A hotel described by a portal’s words,not its own.
A composite of family hotels on the coast. No real business, no real figures. The defects and the order of fixes are the ones I find again and again.
λ.00 · What the buyer sees · same question, three places · swipe
and are recommended for families. also comes up, described in the portal’s words.3 competitors (names redacted)
You · in the portal’s wordsWhat the buyer gets
The portal’s words, every time.
Picture a family hotel with forty rooms, guests from Italy, Austria and Germany, and a site in four languages that was translated once in 2019. Ask an assistant from Trieste for a quiet family hotel near the beach in the town and the hotel is sometimes named, but every word about it is the portal's: the portal's category, the portal's photo captions, the portal's two-year-old price. The hotel's own site is never cited.
The site says nothing a machine can use. No Hotel entity, no amenities in structured data, the Italian version is machine-translated with the German menu still in it, and the direct-booking page is a frame from a booking engine that search engines cannot read. The portal is the only coherent source, so the portal writes the hotel's answer and collects the commission on it.
How I’d read it
Five layers, five verdicts.
The fixes
In the order that moves the answer.
- 1Own the descriptionWrite the hotel's own description once, in the hotel's voice, and put it in every source: tourism board, regional directory, review profiles, and the portals too. The assistant should find the same sentence everywhere and the longest version on the hotel's site. M.01 · week 1
- 2Declare the hotelA Hotel entity with star rating, amenities, check-in times, the beach distance, pet policy and a reservation action pointing at the direct booking page, generated from the room data rather than typed. M.02 · week 1
- 3One Italian a Trieste family would readNative rewrite of the Italian and German first screens, hreflang across all four versions, each with its own address and sitemap entry; the stale 2019 price paragraph gone. M.03 · weeks 2 to 4
- 4A booking page search engines can readReplace the booking-engine frame with a crawlable page that states rooms, dates and prices in text, and hands off to the engine only at the last step. M.04 · week 3
What I’d hold this to
Measured the way the buyer sees it.
At least one assistant cites the hotel's own site, in the hotel's sentence.
The hotel's site above the portal's page for the hotel's own name.
Direct bookings as a share of the total, tracked from the sprint onward.