Neobookings launches Neo Direct Intelligence, the AI platform that connects marketing, distribution and bookings to optimise direct sales

For years, hotel digital marketing has been managed by looking at campaigns, clicks, conversions and advertising return. The problem is that a campaign never works in isolation.

• It may attract traffic but fail to convert because the hotel has no rooms open for those dates.
• It may look profitable in Google Ads but when compared with the bookings that actually reach the engine the numbers do not add up.
• It may be very well designed and aligned with the objectives, yet still leave sales uncaptured because an OTA offers a better price that week, or because there is a market that regularly books the hotel through Booking.com without anyone adjusting the budget to reach that guest first.

A conventional marketing agency works with whatever the advertising platform reports back but it does not know how much direct business the hotel has, what comes in through Booking.com or what availability was open at the moment of the click.

At Neobookings we handle all of that data, and that places us in front of a very different reality with enormous potential. Potential that, from now on, becomes action.

Neo Direct Intelligence analyses up to more than 35 signals, to detect where the hotel is losing direct sales

An unbeatable position within the hotel technology ecosystem

At Neobookings we are the ones managing the campaigns, the direct sales technology and the connectivity with distribution. This gives us a clear advantage over other providers, because we work with information that usually stays fragmented between agencies, booking engines, analytics tools, advertising platforms and sales teams.

On that basis we have developed a platform that connects, analyses and interprets in real time the main signals involved in the direct sales of a hotel: advertising campaigns, Google Hotel Ads, Google Analytics, Search Console, booking engine, availability, prices, disparities, production by market and competition against our own ads. If the hotel also has the channel manager contracted, the platform additionally incorporates the sales registered in Booking.com and the main OTAs.

From measuring campaigns to understanding why they sell and how to make them sell much more

The first thing Neo Direct Intelligence does is resolve in seconds what until now required consulting several tools, requesting information from different departments and spending hours on manual analysis.

The platform identifies campaigns with spend and no conversion, recommends bid adjustments with a specific value, proposes negative keywords and calculates the savings they represent, locates ads with expired dates or promotions, detects mismatches between the language of the ad and that of the landing page, and uncovers positioning opportunities based on real searches.

It also works on the copy. This intelligent platform generates and corrects the ads, reviews the grammar, adapts expressions to each language instead of translating them literally, and creates new ads to increase CTR.

A before and after in the way data is handled

The fundamental difference of Neo Direct Intelligence is the cross-referencing of campaign data with the commercial reality of the hotel.

If a campaign does not convert, the platform checks whether there was availability for the dates searched, whether the hotel was offering the best price, what level of disparity it presented at that moment, or whether an OTA was gaining visibility on brand searches for the property itself.

A common example:

The hotel blames the poor result on the campaign, but the historical data shows that, in practice, almost every time it appeared in a search it had a less competitive price than other options. From there, the platform can cross that figure with demand behaviour and detect, for instance, that bookings coming from a specific market are reaching the hotel through an OTA. In that case it can identify demand that the direct channel could be capturing but the campaign is not reaching, because the budget is insufficient.

«Be careful with the information Google returns, because it is not all you need in order to decide. You have to know what price you had that day, what availability there was, what the OTAs were offering and where the booking ended up happening», explains José María Ramón, CEO and founder of Neobookings.

Artificial intelligence genuinely connected to the business

The hotel industry is adopting AI tools at great speed, but most of the time it is done without a clear criterion. Artificial intelligence only proposes relevant decisions when it has the real context of the business.

Neo Direct Intelligence combines all the data and generates a diagnosis for each account and prioritises the actions to execute, indicating what works, what is limiting conversion and where there is a potential loss of investment.

698 optimisations applied, with artificial intelligence and professional human supervision

In the first eight weeks we applied 698 audited actions across the Google Ads accounts actively managed with the system. 96% of them started from a suggestion generated by artificial intelligence.

Based on the reports, ads were improved, negative keywords were added, bid adjustments were made and technical corrections were carried out.

None of these actions is executed automatically. The marketing specialists at Neobookings review, interpret and approve every action. The technology provides an analytical capacity that no person can sustain manually at that speed. The team provides the knowledge of the hotel, its strategy and its commercial moment.

Measuring profitability with engine data

Neo Direct Intelligence compares the conversions reported by Google with the bookings registered in the engine, account by account. It shows the commission reported by the campaign alongside the real commission calculated on the engine and flags the cases where the gap between the two is significant. This makes it possible to locate measurement problems, understand the impact of cookie restrictions on attribution and calculate profitability with information far closer to the economic reality of the hotel.

Disparity control works across all hotels with a Neobookings engine, whether or not they have campaigns contracted. That is how we have detected cases such as a hotel that was not showing the best price in 97% of its impressions, a situation that was holding back its conversion without anyone having identified it.

Available from now on for our clients with active campaigns

The marketing and account management team at Neobookings already works with Neo Direct Intelligence on real campaigns, and hotels that have the digital marketing service contracted benefit from it at no additional cost.

Our goal is to improve the quality of decisions, reduce unproductive investment, detect problems affecting conversion earlier and adapt the budget to the commercial situation of each property. Later on we will extend its capabilities and study new ways of access for hotels and chains.

The intelligent platform answers, continuously, all those questions that affect hotel revenue:

• Where is direct business being lost?
• What is limiting conversion?
• Which investment is not producing bookings?
• Which market is arriving through an OTA?
• Where is Booking.com competing against the hotel brand?
• What should the team review first?
• Which specific action can improve the result?

«The advantage lies in connecting the right data and turning it into a decision that improves the business. For the first time, Neobookings connects it inside a single intelligence specialised in hotel direct sales. Our clients already have that advantage. The question for everyone else is not whether artificial intelligence will change hotel marketing, but how much business they are losing until they start using it», says José María Ramón.