· visibility at the point of choiceMcKinsey Quarterly · 2009
About two-thirds of what influences choice during comparison comes not from advertising, but from reviews and other people’s experiences.
Elutio · for hotels
We shift the balance of guest flow —
in your hotel’s favour.
At the point of choice, we work so that your hotel looks stronger than the hotels nearby on Booking, Google, Tripadvisor and in AI responses.
What Elutio does
Your future guests have already been sold on the trip.
Airlines, aggregators, social media and the entire travel industry have created the demand.
We step in at the next stage, when guests choose a specific hotel.
01
We see your hotel as guests do
We audit how your hotel looks on key platforms and in AI responses compared with the hotels nearby: ratings, reviews, responses, photos and your hotel’s strengths. The result is a document with figures and findings.
02
We make your hotel’s strengths visible
We work to make it easier for future guests to see your hotel’s strengths: SPA, peace and quiet, family holidays, fitness, service, location and other important advantages.
We work to give guests more reasons to choose you
03
We organise a flow of high-quality guest reviews
We build a regular flow of detailed reviews from real guests and distribute them across platforms. Not “five stars without a word”, but accounts of real experiences that persuade future guests.
04
We respond professionally to every review
We handle difficult reviews calmly, directly and with responsibility for the situation. We work so that the next reader sees mature management, not a formal template.
05
We send a monthly report
How your hotel looks through guests’ eyes: rating trends, review topics and comparison with the hotels nearby. Your team’s work, previously invisible from the outside, becomes visible both online and in the report’s figures.
For managers, this report is a ready-made performance measure: the results of your decisions show up in trends in public metrics, not in words.
Audit my hotel
We work with a limited number of hotels and never with your direct competitors in the same location.
How guests choose
Guests choose a location first. Then they compare hotels carefully.
It starts with the idea of a holiday. The whole world sells that idea: airline advertising, travel videos, aggregators and other people’s seaside photos. Once the idea becomes a location, the choice of hotel begins within that location.
Guests then choose a specific hotel carefully. A holiday happens once or twice a year, costs serious money and cannot be redone. So before booking, guests check everything. They open Booking, Google Maps and Tripadvisor, read reviews, especially the negative ones, and see how the hotel responds. Increasingly, they simply ask AI to compile a shortlist of hotels.
Guests are more likely to choose the hotel whose advantages are presented more clearly and are easier to see.
One recent unanswered review saying, “We checked in. The room reeked of cigarette smoke,” can be enough for a family with children to choose another hotel.
Demand for your location has already been created and paid for. The only question is which hotel gets the guests.
Expectations
This is not a two-week advertising campaign
Reputation builds over time. The first noticeable changes may appear within a few months, but the main effect comes from consistent work.
Over time, guests gain their own reasons to choose you: families see proof of comfort for children; couples, of peace and atmosphere; business guests, of service and reliability.
Such public evidence accumulates and continues to work for the hotel between seasons and advertising campaigns.
Accumulated reputation has two effects:
You are seen from every angle
Guests arrive through maps, aggregators, reviews and AI, and keep coming across you. By the time they book, the question of trust is largely settled: they book rather than continue comparing.
Market-resilient guest flow
When the market grows, a hotel like this receives more bookings, and they grow faster than the market. When the market falls, its guest flow declines more slowly than at other hotels, so redistribution again works in your favour.
Over time, systematic work can also open the way to platform awards: honours such as Tripadvisor Travelers’ Choice, received by fewer than 1% of properties, or Booking Traveller Review Awards. This is neither a promise nor a quick result. It is an additional layer of trust that all guests see.
If this applies to you
Is a new hotel opening nearby?
It is hard to compete directly with newness, an international brand and a launch budget.
But you can build up what the new hotel will not have in its first season: a history of reviews, guest trust and visible proof of quality. It is better to start before it opens.
Economics
The stronger on Google and in AI, the lower the commissions
Every booking through Booking, Agoda and other OTAs comes at a price: the platform’s commission. For many hotels, this is one of the most painful costs. The better things go, the more money goes to intermediaries.
But at the point of choice, some channels lead guests directly to you. Google Maps is virtually the only major platform that displays a hotel’s direct contact details: its official website, phone number and messaging apps. AI recommendations also send guests to your website, not an intermediary’s page.
We are not suggesting that you abandon OTAs. They provide guest flow, visibility and convenience for guests. You already receive direct bookings. But when your hotel’s Google profile is strong and AI names your hotel for location searches, the share of guests booking directly grows. Dependence on OTAs does not disappear; it decreases, and the structure of acquisition costs gradually shifts in your favour.
A guest coming directly from Google or through an AI recommendation is a booking with no OTA commission.
Why the logic works
The decision forms between advertising and booking
The largest market studies confirm this. The mechanism is especially unforgiving in travel: guests go somewhere unfamiliar, cannot check anything in advance and do not want to risk their holiday.
Google / Shopper Sciences · 2011
In travel, 99% of guests make their decision based on what they find about you online. This is the highest figure of any industry.
Harvard Business Review · 2010
Companies spend 70–90% of their budget on advertising, while the decision forms during comparison and after the trip.
Next step
We will show how your hotel looks at the point of choice
Step 1
Audit
We walk the path of your future guest. We see how your hotel looks on Booking, Google, Tripadvisor and in AI responses compared with other hotels in the location.
Result
A document with specific figures
A recent audit of a SPA hotel uncovered 48 substantiated complaints that had received no response, plus an extra charge that had angered guests for two years running.
Step 2
Solution plan
The audit comes with a specific proposal: what we propose to do, in what order and at what cost. You get not only a picture of what is happening, but a ready-made action plan.