Tim Major, CEO of Operto, shares his opinion on affiliate brand bidding and its impact on hotel search visibility and direct revenue.
For years, the hotel industry has framed the distribution conversation around one idea: drive more direct bookings by reducing OTA commissions, investing in brand marketing, and improving your website. But there is a quieter problem hiding underneath all of this. Many hotels no longer fully control their own brand presence in search.
Right now, more than 250,000 Google ads across Canada and the United States target hotel brand names, run by affiliate booking sites that sit outside the hotel’s control. These ads replicate brand language, mimic official listings, and redirect guests through OTA affiliate networks.
To the guest, it often looks like the hotel’s website. In reality, the traveller has already entered a different distribution channel.Â
The tactic itself is not new. Brand bidding has existed in travel marketing for years. What has changed is the scale and the technology now powering it. What was once an occasional nuisance has evolved into something far more systematic.
The easiest booking in hospitality
When someone searches for a hotel by name, the hardest part of the booking journey is already over. The traveller is aware of your property and has a high intent to book. The search is simply the final step before completing the reservation. Yet search results rarely reflect that simplicity.
Affiliate sites linked to platforms like Expedia and Booking.com routinely bid on hotel brand terms, positioning themselves between the guest and the hotel’s own website at the exact moment a traveller is ready to book. Many of these sites operate through OTA affiliate programs, allowing third parties to promote hotel inventory in exchange for a share of the commission.
Additional margin is often created through pricing structures that introduce hidden fees during checkout or embed charges within the tax line. Cancellation policies may also differ from those set by the hotel itself.
From the hotel’s perspective, the booking simply appears as another OTA reservation. The implications, however, are significant. The hotel pays commission on demand it created itself, the guest assumes the booking experience reflects the hotel, and the property loses direct access to the guest relationship entirely.
An ecosystem that has scaled beyond manual control
Brand hijacking in search is not new. What has changed is how industrialised the ecosystem surrounding it has become.
Hundreds of thousands of ads now run simultaneously across hotel brand terms. When one advertiser account disappears, another often appears shortly after. For hotel teams trying to monitor this manually, the experience can feel endless.
Affiliate advertising networks operate continuously, launching campaigns and rotating advertiser accounts faster than most manual monitoring processes can realistically respond. Automation allows these campaigns to scale in ways that were not possible a decade ago. What once required individual advertisers can now be executed at scale across thousands of properties simultaneously.
The impact often hides inside normal distribution data. Bookings appear to originate from OTAs even when the guest initially searched for the hotel by name. Because the diversion happens earlier in the journey, many hotels never see it.
Why independent hotels feel the impact most
Independent and boutique hotels often feel the impact most acutely. These properties depend heavily on direct bookings to protect margins and build repeat relationships with guests. At the same time, smaller marketing budgets can make them easier targets for affiliates bidding on their brand.
When brand demand is intercepted, those advantages disappear. The booking arrives through an OTA channel, commission is paid, and the hotel never owns the guest relationship. What appears to be normal OTA demand may in fact be brand traffic the hotel generated itself.
When the attack is automated and the defense is manual
The real challenge today is not recognising that brand bidding exists – it is keeping up with it. For many hotel teams, brand monitoring still happens periodically. Someone checks search results, flags an issue, and attempts to resolve it.
But the ecosystem surrounding brand hijacking does not operate periodically. It operates continuously. That mismatch has turned brand protection from a marketing task into something closer to an operational responsibility.
Why brand defense is becoming automated
Some hotel teams are beginning to rethink how brand protection is handled altogether. If the ecosystem around brand bidding operates continuously, monitoring it periodically will always leave gaps. The issue is not awareness, it is pace.
A new approach is beginning to emerge. Instead of relying on periodic audits, specialised systems now monitor brand search results continuously, identifying when affiliate listings appear against a hotel’s name and surfacing those threats in real time. Artificial intelligence takes this a step further. Rather than simply reporting the problem, AI-driven systems can analyse search activity, detect patterns of brand hijacking, and trigger defensive actions automatically.
In practice, this shifts brand protection from a reactive task to a continuous process. Search visibility can be monitored automatically, violations flagged as they appear, and defensive strategies adjusted in real time. When the ecosystem operates at machine speed, defending brand visibility increasingly requires the same.
A blind spot the industry needs to address
Many properties are already losing bookings they effectively generated themselves. Not because the traveller chose an OTA, but because the guest never reached the hotel’s website in the first place.
Brand bidding is not new. What has changed is the scale and persistence of the ecosystem surrounding it. In a distribution landscape that is becoming increasingly automated, brand protection may need to evolve in the same direction.
