Hospitality Paid Media That Fills Tables and Books Rooms
Restaurant advertising and hotel paid media get judged on clicks while the numbers that matter, covers and room nights, live somewhere else. We run Google, Meta, and TikTok for hospitality brands with campaigns built around bookings, seasons, and the guests actually within reach. You own the accounts, the data, and the system.
Where it breaks
The problems we see over and over.
OTAs own your guest
Booking platforms take a commission on every stay and keep the guest relationship. The more they fill your rooms, the less of each booking you keep and the less you learn about who came.
Clicks up, covers flat
Ad platforms count clicks and calls, but reservations land in OpenTable, Resy, or your booking engine. Without that connection, nobody can say which campaign actually filled a table.
Budgets that ignore the calendar
Hospitality demand swings with seasons, events, and days of the week. Most accounts spend the same on a dead Tuesday as they do the weekend of the biggest event in town.
Targeting the wrong map
A radius set once at launch wastes spend on people who will never walk in and misses the travelers planning a trip to your market. Locals and visitors need different campaigns, not one blended audience.
How this plays out
The pattern, up close.
Picture a Tuesday in the shoulder season. The ads dashboard says last week went fine, clicks up, cost per click down, a screenshot ready for the owners. Meanwhile the reservation book says something else, a half-empty dining room early in the week and a comp set quietly dropping rates. The two reports never meet, so the team argues about feelings instead of numbers. Spend keeps running on autopilot because nobody can prove what it is doing.
The usual fix is to hand the accounts to a generalist or crank the budget when occupancy dips. Neither works here, because hospitality demand is a calendar problem, not a volume problem. More spend on a dead Monday buys clicks from people who were never going out, and pausing everything in the slow season goes dark right when travelers are planning trips. Meanwhile booking platforms keep bidding on your own name, so the reservations you do get arrive with a commission attached. The account was not broken, it was pointed at the wrong scoreboard.
With the system in, the scoreboard is covers and room nights, wired straight from your reservation and booking platforms. Budgets move with your calendar, heavier ahead of the weekends and events that matter, lighter when the money would be wasted, all on a written weekly cadence. Say you run a restaurant group and one boutique hotel. Each week you would see a single report that names which campaigns filled tables, which filled rooms, and what changed because of it. And since you own the accounts and the data, the guest relationship builds in your house, not on a booking platform.
Signs this is you
Your ad report says clicks are up while the reservation book says Tuesday was dead
OTA commissions grew faster than direct bookings did last year
The same daily budget runs on a slow Monday and the biggest event weekend of the year
Nobody can name the campaign that filled Saturday's covers
Your geo targeting has not changed since the account launched
A booking platform outranks you when someone searches your own name
What we do about it
Audit · Build · Manage
An audit measured in covers and room nights
We start with a fixed-scope audit of your accounts, scored against bookings rather than clicks. You keep the dollar-weighted plan whether or not we do the work.
Reservation tracking that closes the loop
We wire conversions from your reservation and booking systems back to the campaigns that drove them. Reporting reads in tables filled and rooms booked, and it writes itself weekly.
Direct bookings over OTA commissions
We build campaigns that send guests to your own booking engine, so you keep the margin and the guest data. OTAs become one channel, not the landlord.
Geo and traveler targeting that fits the map
Restaurants get radius and intent campaigns sized to how far people really travel for a meal. Hotels get feeder-market and trip-planning campaigns aimed at travelers before they open an OTA.
A cadence built on your calendar
Senior hands manage the accounts on a weekly documented cadence that flexes budget with seasons, events, and slow nights. Every change is written down where you can read it.
The work behind us: $100M+ in managed spend, including multi-location brands with hundreds of locations. Every account gets senior hands, a weekly documented cadence, and reporting you can actually read.
Same industry, other services
The first 30 days
What actually happens after you say go.
Weeks 1-2: Access and audit
We get read access to your ad accounts, analytics, and reservation or booking platforms, everything staying in your name from day one. Then we audit what the spend is actually producing, scored in covers and room nights rather than clicks. The leaks usually show up in three places: the calendar, the geography, and the overlap with OTAs.
Weeks 2-3: The plan and first fixes
You get a dollar-weighted plan, biggest leaks first. Early fixes tend to be wiring reservation conversions to the campaigns that drove them, splitting locals from travelers, and pulling budget off the days that never book. Nothing gets rebuilt for the sake of rebuilding.
Week 4: The operating rhythm starts
The weekly cadence begins, with budgets checked against the coming calendar and every change documented where you can read it. Your first report arrives written in tables filled and rooms booked. From here the account improves on a schedule, not whenever someone remembers it.
From the blog
How we think about hospitality & restaurants marketing.
UTM Tracking, Done Properly
A practical guide to UTM tracking: the five parameters, casing rules, governance, common breakages, and how to audit the links you already have.
ReadA Weekly Search Terms and Negatives Workflow
A repeatable weekly workflow for Google Ads search terms: fast reviews, intent buckets, shared negative lists, broad match discipline, and a decision log.
ReadThe Paid Media Reporting Stack, Explained
The five layers of a paid media reporting stack, from raw platform exports to a narrative people actually read, and where AI fits in the middle.
ReadQuestions we get
Straight answers.
Can you track actual reservations and bookings, not just clicks?
Yes. We connect your reservation and booking platforms to your ad accounts so campaigns get credit for the covers and room nights they produce. When a platform will not pass data cleanly, we build the closest reliable proxy and label it as one.
Can paid media reduce our dependence on OTAs?
It can shift the mix. We run campaigns that capture demand before it reaches a booking platform and route it to your own engine, where you keep the margin and the guest relationship. OTAs still have a role, but they stop being the default path.
Do you produce the ad creative?
We do not produce creative in-house. When creative is the gap, we connect you with creative teams we trust and wire their work into the system. Our job is making sure every asset runs in the right structure and gets measured against bookings.
Who owns the ad accounts and the data?
You do, from day one. Accounts, audiences, conversion data, dashboards, and naming conventions all live in your name. If we ever part ways, everything stays with you.
Is there a minimum budget where this makes sense?
There is a shape, not a magic number. Spend needs to be large enough that campaigns can gather real booking data and that senior management pays for itself in recovered waste and recaptured OTA margin. A single independent spot running a small brand campaign is usually too early. A restaurant group, a hotel with real seasonal swings, or one property competing hard against a comp set is squarely in range. The Diagnostic Call is where we tell you which side you are on.
Should we pause ads in the off-season?
Usually no, but the spend should not look the same either. Travelers plan trips weeks or months out, so the off-season is often when next season's rooms get booked. We shift budget toward trip-planning and feeder-market campaigns when demand is soft, then toward near-term bookings when the calendar fills. Going fully dark just hands the planning window to the OTAs.
Find out what is leaking before you spend another dollar.
One call. We learn what you are running and tell you the first move worth making.