24 - Google Changes Your Hotel Needs to Know

In The News: Marriott / Starwood Merger Complete http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/roadwarriorvoices/2016/09/23/marriott-starwood-merger-complete-and-loyal-customers-get-reciprocal-benefits/90885318/ Almost one year after purchase date $13 Billion Now Marriott owns 30 brands / more than 5,700 hotels / 1.1 Million Rooms / 110 Countries Big focus on loyalty program now - members of both programs can log in at Members.marriott.com to begin earning & redeeming points at all hotels; new, unified experience. https://skift.com/2016/09/21/every-one-of-marriotts-30-hotel-brands-explained/ Expedia launches Rev+ revenue management tool https://www.tnooz.com/article/expedia-pushes-hotel-b2b-services-with-revenue-management-launch/ Expedia axes strategy of dimming hotels that apparently offer low value https://www.tnooz.com/article/expedia-stops-dimming-hotels-in-search-results-that-offer-low-value/ Google Rolls Out Cross Device Retargeting http://searchengineland.com/google-roll-cross-device-retargeting-259567 ======================== Show Notes: SERP Changes Google showing flights & hotel costs for vacation searches: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-flights-hotel-costs-vacations-22734.html Showing for very broad searches (ex: Caribbean vacations) New “popular destinations” box with hotel & flight price information Clicking on any of the boxes will take you to a Destinations on Google page Google showing booking widget in SERPs for hotel brand searches: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hotel-booking-top-22749.html Google starting testing placing a hotel booking widget within the search results above Adwords ads Algorithm Changes: Google Possum algorithm update http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900 http://searchengineland.com/google-updates-penguin-says-now-real-time-part-core-algorithm-259302 Also an update to Google’s Penguin Algorithm. Penguin is Google’s algorithm update that identifies sites using spammy linking practices. this would be Penguins 4th major release We’ve heard that Google was trying to bake Penguin into the algorithm so it operates in real-time and now it seems that will be the case. Before this update Google was dishing out site-wide penalties. Sites would have to make huge efforts to remove and disavow spammy links. Sites would remain penalized until the next time the Penguin filter ran and only then would there be chance to have the penalty lifted. This update is supposed to run more granularly. With this update Google crawls and indexes pages, and the Penguin filter will assess the pages in real time. Penalties will now be assessed on more of a page or site-section level than a site-wide level. While some claim to have seen the effects already we will likely see more and more affected as this continues to roll out. Mobile App: Google Launches Google Trips App https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/19/google-launches-a-personalized-travel-planner-google-trips/ Question of the week: Lara Samaha on Twitter: "Hi @stuartbutler. I have a question. How can you track Tripconnect conversations on Google @googleanalytics ?" Google's handy link generator: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/