One King West Hotel & Residence: Tapping into Amadeus’ Media Expertise to Grow Direct Booking Revenue Share

As a result of strategic media campaigns powered by Amadeus Media solutions, direct bookings at the luxury Toronto hotel achieved an 82% increase in direct booking revenue year-over-year.

Saurabh Mehta, General Manager, One King West Hotel & Residence: “After having the pleasure of working with Amadeus to integrate iHotelier onto our website, we faced challenges with our channel mix. Based on recommendations from Amadeus’ Media team, we decided to prioritize increasing the share of reservations to direct bookings. Building and launching a media campaign with Amadeus made perfect sense as they are our tried and tested experts in hospitality, tech and advertising. We look forward to our continued partnership with Amadeus.”

Setting the Scene

Located in downtown Toronto, One King West Hotel & Residence is a boutique property featuring well-appointed suites and luxurious amenities. The property prides itself on its brand recognition, which can be attributed to its award-winning services and the historic roots of one building dating back to the 1800s.

For over seven years, One King West Hotel & Residence has harnessed the power of Amadeus’ iHotelier® Booking Engine to provide a frictionless and intuitive online shopping journey. Tailored to the needs of today’s ecommerce-savvy customers, iHotelier has simplified the property’s booking process with a consistent and user-friendly experience that has helped the property convert more website visitors into actual guests.

The Challenge

In 2022, One King West Hotel & Residence seeks to drive more direct bookings – and revenue – on their hotel website, and to optimize their channel mix while reducing their reliability on online travel agencies (OTAs).

The Solution

The property tapped into Amadeus’ Media expertise, specifically partnering with the Digital Media team to launch an online advertising campaign that combined advertising tactics across Pay-per-Click (PPC) and Display to help increase customer acquisition for the client’s website.

The Amadeus team’s ongoing review of One King West’s iHotelier Booking Engine data identified trends around average booking windows and length of stay, enabling them to identify specific packages and promotions to be shared through online advertisements, unlocking new revenue opportunities.

Some of the key strategies that helped One King West achieve stronger results include:

• To reach and re-engage customers, Amadeus leveraged the brand’s first-party data, and paired it with Google’s Customer Match to identify potential guests with similar preferences or behaviors.
• To maximize the campaign’s coverage and improve user experience, the ads were delivered in multiple languages ​​based on the potential guest’s location.
• To expand the campaign’s reach and to engage with new users, the team leveraged Display Prospecting and Remarketing.

Display Prospecting –

Hotels can drive traffic to their websites and grow brand awareness with high-performance targeting of their display ads. Display Prospecting allows properties to attract new guests through programmatic advertising that leverages a set of characteristics (contextual, behavioral, and demographic) to identify new audiences.

Brands that are already known in the marketplace, like One King West Hotel & Residence, but seek to tap into new audiences can leverage Display Prospecting.

Results

Following campaign deployment in 2022, between August 2022 and March 2023, One King West was able to shift 6% of bookings from OTAs to direct reservations. Moreover, these direct bookings had a 30% higher average daily rate (ADR) than OTA bookings, allowing the property to increase revenue by over USD 350,000.