When booking sites bid on your hotel name: brand search ads and what a hotel can do

Brand bidding is when a booking site buys a search ad that appears when someone types your hotel's name. Ad platforms generally allow trademarks as keywords and restrict them only in ad text, in specific cases. Your contract with the booking site, and your own brand ad, decide who gets the click.

You type your hotel's name into a search box and the first result is not your website. It is a booking site, with a small label marking it as paid and a price for your own rooms. Nothing is broken, and the position is being bought. After reading this article you will know how hotel brand bidding works, what your contract and the ad platform's policy each allow, and how to decide whether running your own ad on your name pays.

What you see on a brand search, and why#

You see a paid ad, because someone bought your hotel's name as a keyword and the ad platform sells that keyword to whoever bids. The site selling the ad earns commission when the click becomes a booking.

The results page has two zones. Paid placements sit at the top, marked with a label such as "Sponsored", and unpaid results sit below them. The unpaid result is earned; the paid one is bought.

A brand bid is an ordinary keyword bid. The advertiser picks your hotel's name as the keyword, writes a short ad, and chooses a page on its own site as the destination. A booking site can do this because it already has a page about your hotel, with your rates and availability, and a commission on any booking that comes from it.

Position is decided by the ad platform's auction, not by who owns the name. Ownership of the name is a trademark question; placement is a bidding question. You can check all of this without any tool: the label, the domain shown in the ad, the page the click lands on, and whether the price shown matches the rate you gave that site.

Two separate questions follow, and they have different answers: what your contract with that site allows, and what the ad platform's own policy allows. Paid ads are only half of the page. The unpaid result is a different mechanism with different levers, covered in our hotel website SEO checklist.

What does your contract with the booking site say about your name?#

It may say something specific, and it may say nothing at all. Either way it is the first place to look, because the contract governs what your partner may do with your name, your content and your rates.

Look for clauses on brand or keyword bidding, trademark and logo use, and marketing. Some agreements restrict bidding on the hotel's name; many are silent. Read the rate and display clauses next. The price in the ad usually comes from the rate you supplied, so the ad is downstream of your own rate agreement.

Check the content licence too: what photos, descriptions and logos the site may use, and where. Silence is not permission in either direction. It means the question is open, and renewal is the moment to settle it in writing. Note the notice period and the renewal date now. A request sent after renewal is a request for next year.

Whether a particular clause is enforceable, and whether a site's use of your name crosses a legal line, is a question for your legal adviser, not for this article. Keep one folder with the signed contract, the rate agreement and the renewal date, so that the answer is available in ten minutes rather than ten days. For the wider relationship, see our guide to working with booking sites.

What does Google's trademark policy allow?#

Google Ads states that it abides by local trademark law and does not allow ads that infringe trademark rights. In practice it restricts a trademark in ad text in defined cases, and leaves trademarks used only as keywords alone.

Where the mark appears decides the case. The policy looks at the ad itself, not only at the landing page. A trademark used only as a keyword, or in the second-level domain of the display URL, is not restricted, according to Google's Trademarks policy in the Advertising Policies Help (7 November 2026) (opens in a new tab).

Google will restrict use of a trademark in an ad coming from a direct competitor, and any use in an ad that is confusing, deceptive or misleading. It will not restrict a landing page mainly dedicated to selling, or clearly facilitating the sale of, the trademarked service, provided the page clearly offers a way to buy and shows commercial information such as rates or prices, and the ad and page make clear whether the advertiser is a reseller or an informational site. Informational sites, and descriptive use of a term in its ordinary meaning, are also outside the restriction.

Complaints are accepted only against specific advertisers identified by URL, within the countries and industries where the owner has shown trademark rights. A restriction then generally applies, on an ongoing basis, to all ads with the same second-level domain in the final URL. Breaches do not bring immediate suspension: Google warns at least seven days before suspending an account.

Read against a hotel's situation, a booking site that sells your rooms and shows rates on a page about your hotel sits closer to the reseller case; a competing hotel bidding on your name sits closer to the competitor case. The policy is the platform's rule, not the law, and trademark law is a separate question for counsel.

Source: Google, Trademarks, Advertising Policies Help (7 November 2026).

Should you run your own ad on your hotel's name?#

Often yes, as a small and measured test. Your own brand ad is usually the cheapest click you can buy, and it puts your own booking page in front of a person who has already decided they want you.

The mechanics are simple: bid on your exact name, write an ad that names the hotel, and send the click to your own booking page rather than the home page. Decide the question before you spend: cost per direct booking from the ad, compared with the commission you would pay if the same booking arrived through a booking site.

Set a small budget and a fixed window, and record clicks, bookings and room revenue, not clicks alone. Accept the honest limit: some of those clicks would have reached you free through the unpaid result. Incremental bookings are hard to isolate, so treat a first test as directional, not as proof.

Keep the ad text plain and true: your own name, your own rate, nothing you cannot honor at the desk. Do not buy an ad to cover for a weak page. If the landing page is slow or unclear, the click is wasted at any price.

For the wider comparison across channels, see distribution cost per booking: comparing channels by what the hotel keeps.

How do you keep your own website and Google listing strong on the name?#

Make your own result the most obviously correct answer to the query: one page that matches the name people type, with the address, the rooms, the rates and a booking path that works.

Build one page per property that carries the hotel's name as people actually write it, the full address, the room types and a direct booking path above the fold. Keep the Google Business Profile complete and current: category, address, opening hours, photos, and a website link that points to your own domain, not to a booking site's page.

Add structured data for the hotel and its rooms so search engines can read the name, address and price range without guessing. In plain terms, it is a machine-readable label on the page. Hotel price surfaces inside Google are a separate mechanism from ordinary ads and are covered in our guide to Google hotel prices, Hotel Center and free booking links; this article makes no claim about their availability for a given property or country.

Speed and mobile matter because the click lands somewhere: a page that loads in a second keeps the visitor, a page that stalls hands them back to the ad above. Keep the name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear, so that search engines and travelers see one business, not three.

How do you measure what a direct booking costs you?#

Divide the total cost of the channel by the bookings it produced, and compare like with like: the same room, the same nights, the same revenue line.

Two numbers do most of the work: cost per direct booking from your ad, and commission per booking through the site. Put them on the same room revenue and the comparison becomes readable. Include the costs people forget: the agency or freelancer fee, the booking engine fee, and the staff hours spent on the campaign.

Attribute carefully. Last-click reporting flatters the ad; read the booking source in your property management system next to the ad platform's report and reconcile the two. Record a baseline before the test and compare the same weeks of the same season, not a quiet month against a busy one.

Judge the net, not the revenue line: what the hotel keeps per booking is the number that pays salaries. Review monthly. The answer moves with the season and with what other advertisers bid, so a figure from last winter is not a decision for this summer.

What to do next#

Pull the contract with the booking site and note what it says about your name, then record three name searches a week apart so you know what a traveler actually sees. From there, run one small brand ad test against a baseline and compute cost per direct booking with your own figures. If an ad uses your mark in its text in a way that misleads, take it to your legal adviser and to the ad platform's complaint process, which asks for specific advertisers by URL.