Last year, after Bing Ads ran its Hotel Ads offering in beta, it decided to roll them out in general release. Bing Ads’ initial partner is travel advertising platform Koddi, which is also participated in the beta.
The Hotel Ads experience in Bing is much like Google’s. Bing’s interface gives searchers a fast way to input travel dates and quickly see pricing across different travel engines.
There are “sort” options, which let users look at best match, price or ratings. The ratings feature a TripAdvisor integration that displays the number of reviews and TripAdvisor ranking of a hotel. Hotel Ads will even feature multiple image cards for hotels, as well as an interactive map that’s powered by Bing Maps. This will let users refin or customize their hotel searches even further.
The hotel data will be populated via an XML feed named the Hotel Feed that advertisers assemble, which includes data like hotel name, address, phone number and location.
There’s another XML feed that’s called Point of Sale Feed, and it details the sites that users can use to book rooms.
After importing the feeds, advertisers are able to push or pull itinerary data for hotel properties via Transaction Messages.
There is going to be a new PPC campaign type, similar to Shopping, where accounts can be organized into accounts, subaccounts, hotel groups and hotels, with several levels of bidding available to advertisers.
Koddi advertisers will have access to Bing Hotel Ads through the Koddi platform upon the release.