The brand hijacking hotels have learned to live with
Search for your hotel by name and look at what comes back. Above your own website, there’s a good chance you’ll find a paid ad from a third-party booking site dressed up looking like you, waiting for a guest who had already decided to stay with you. Most hoteliers have seen it, and most have filed it under the cost of doing business.
It’s that resignation that creates a bigger problem than the ads themselves. An industry that fights hard for every direct booking has made peace with losing them at the moment they should be safest, when a guest is typing the hotel’s name into Google with a card in their hand. Every one of those bookings pays commission to someone who contributed nothing to win it. The hotel created the demand, and a predatory OTA collects at the final click.
I understand where the shrug came from, but it deserves to be challenged anyway.
Resignation was a reasonable strategy, once
For years, giving up was arguably the rational choice. Brand bidding has been a problem since the early 2000’s. Sites like GuestReservations.com built entire businesses around buying ads against hotel names, mirroring the look of an official listing, and routing guests through affiliate networks that layer in fees and cancellation terms the hotel never set. Guests click because search has trained all of us to trust whatever sits at the top of the page.
Hoteliers did not simply ignore this; many fought it, and that fight taught them how the game worked. Report an ad, and it comes down, then a new one appears within days, often from a fresh advertiser account doing exactly the same thing. When a general manager has a property to run, spending hours each week reporting ads that regenerate overnight is not realistic. So teams stopped and the problem got reclassified from something worth fighting to something to endure. That acceptance was passed around as hard-won wisdom: you can’t win this one, put your energy elsewhere.
The logic rested on two assumptions: the losses had to be small enough to absorb, and the fight had to be unwinnable. Neither assumption has survived.
The scale outgrew the shrug
Across North America, roughly 600,000 Google ads alone are now bidding on hotel brand names. That figure describes an industrial operation, running against properties of every size in every market, and the same playbook is spreading through Europe and beyond. These are predatory OTAs, third-party sites built to intercept demand that hotels have already created, and the scale they now operate at has outgrown the industry’s willingness to look the other way.
What sets these ads apart from the broader OTA debate is where they appear in the booking journey. Distribution partners compete for travelers who are still deciding. These sites take guests who have finished deciding, which means the hotel pays commission on demand it already created. The cost doesn’t end with the commission. The guest who gets stung by surprise fees or a cancellation policy you never wrote doesn’t blame a site they’ve never heard of. They blame you, and with that first impression goes the relationship that repeat stays and lifetime value are built on.
For independent hotels, the imbalance is even worse. Large chains have brand teams and legal departments watching their search results, whereas a thirty-room boutique faces the same industrialized interception with whatever time the GM has left on a Friday afternoon.
What changed is the economics of the fight
The old defense failed because it was manual and periodic, usually one person checking search results and filing reports against an operation that was automated and continuous. Of course it lost.
What has shifted is the economics of defending branded search. AI now makes it possible to watch a hotel’s search results the way the interceptors run their ads: constantly, across markets and devices, detecting each new listing as it appears and acting on it in real time, without a human needing to find it first. A new advertiser bids on your name in a market you weren’t watching, and the system identifies it, flags the listing, and initiates a response before your front desk opens the next morning.
That changes what the fight looks like day-to-day. Instead of a general manager spending an hour on Google trying to spot what’s changed since last week, the monitoring runs in the background and surfaces what matters: who is bidding, where, how aggressively, and what it is costing you. The whack-a-mole quality of the problem stops mattering when the response is as continuous as the attack. One ad comes down and another appears, but so does the defense, automatically, at the same speed, every time.
Technology is only part of it. The assumption that carried a decade of resignation, that no hotel could ever keep up, has expired. The problem is now measurable. You can know exactly which sites are bidding on your name, in which markets, and what it is costing you and it is now defensible without consuming your team.
The most expensive habit in hospitality
Every industry carries assumptions that outlive the circumstances that created them. Hospitality’s acceptance of predatory OTAs is one of them, and it costs more each year it survives. Once the problem became measurable and defensible, every hotel that continues to accept it is making a choice to keep paying commission on bookings that were already won.
So run the test. Search for your hotel the way a guest would, on a device that isn’t yours, and look honestly at what appears above your website. If those bookings are already yours to lose, why keep giving them away?
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