Advertising on Tripadvisor allows you to be visible at the exact moment travelers are choosing their next destination. Within Tripadvisor, there are four options for advertising:
Each ad type has its own pricing model, visibility, and management options. Below we explain them in more detail.
With Business Advantage, you pay a fixed subscription fee. This gives hotels extra profile options such as more contact details, promotional modules, access to premium analytics, and the ability to present your brand more effectively.
A key benefit is that clicks from your profile page to your own website are free of charge. These could be visitors who landed on your profile organically (free) via Tripadvisor. In addition, if you advertise with other options within Tripadvisor that drive traffic to your profile page, you do not have to pay again for clicks from your profile page via the price comparison links to your website.
Within Tripadvisor, there is a price comparison feature similar to Google Hotel Ads. This metasearch environment shows prices from OTAs and hotels side-by-side. As a hotel, you can display your direct rate here using a CPC model (TripConnect). You pay per click, and the booking then proceeds via your own website.
When you also have a Business Advantage account, you receive both paid meta clicks and free clicks from your profile page to your own website. Advertising separately can increase your visibility, but is not always necessary—users can click through to your site via your Business Advantage link as well.
As with other metasearch platforms, rate parity is essential. If you are not cheaper or do not offer an extra incentive (such as free breakfast or flexible cancellation), you will quickly lose out to OTAs.
Sponsored Placements are ads that display your hotel higher in search results and on the pages of similar accommodations. They always lead to your profile page on Tripadvisor. Within Sponsored Placements, there are three variants:
Standard Placements: after the click, your profile page is shown including OTA offers alongside your own rate.
Direct Booking: after the click, only your hotel is shown, with OTAs hidden. This increases the chance of direct conversions.
Enterprise: similar to Direct Booking but with more branding opportunities, advanced tracking, and integration with your own marketing technology.
The pricing model is CPC-based. Note that not all campaigns are self-serve—depending on the variant, you may need to set them up or adjust them through your Tripadvisor account manager.
Ad Express is Tripadvisor’s display advertising program. It runs on a CPM basis (cost per thousand impressions) and offers audience targeting based on location, viewed destinations, travel dates, and previous behavior within Tripadvisor.
Ad Express is mainly used for brand awareness, remarketing, and seasonal campaigns. It can be effective both at the top of the funnel and for return visits. As with other formats, some campaigns can be managed directly by you, but many advertisers work through their account manager.
Tripadvisor offers various reporting options to help you optimize your campaigns:
It’s important to understand these distinctions so you can correctly interpret performance and identify which portion of your traffic comes from paid campaigns.
Advertising on Tripadvisor offers hotels and resorts several ways to be visible to travelers who are actively planning. By choosing the right combination of Business Advantage, Meta, Sponsored Placements, and Ad Express, and by measuring campaigns carefully, you can generate more direct bookings and reduce OTA dependency.