The hospitality industry has been caught in a digital vortex in the past two years. What used to be a straightforward task (tracking web traffic and performance metrics) has devolved into a Kafkaesque ordeal. Regulations like the Digital Markets Act and GDPR were introduced under the guise of fairness and privacy but have left hotels drowning in incomplete data and distorted performance insights. Instead of leveling the playing field, these policies have made it nearly impossible for hotels to compete effectively, creating a dystopian reality where hoteliers are forced to make decisions in the dark.
The Digital Markets Act was supposedly meant to empower smaller players in the digital ecosystem, but the results have been catastrophic for hotels. Organic traffic has nosedived, dropping by 20%, while revenue from Google’s Free Booking Links has shrunk by a jaw-dropping 32%. Distribution costs have quietly crept upward, further eroding margins. Meanwhile, with their consolidated tech stacks and airtight tracking systems, OTAs now dominate 62.7% of the market, leaving hotels with a meager 28.1% of direct bookings. These aren’t just numbers; they reflect an industry being systematically suffocated by rules meant to protect it. (source: D-EDGE ).
That being said, the little that is left is slowly becoming untrackable.
The enforcement of stricter cookie policies has rendered cross-domain tracking nearly impossible for hotels, especially those (the majority) with separate URLs for brand.com and website (and I talk about the negative impact of this choice in another article here.
According to some tests I’ve run, up to 65% of booking engine traffic is now a black hole in analytics, lost because users ignore or refuse cookie consent prompts. Who can blame them? Clicking “accept” once on the website is annoying enough; doing it twice on the booking engine is infuriating.
The technical and legal hurdles are staggering, even for those who try to adapt. Sure, my buddy, Alessio Re, is right when he says that Consent Mode v2 offers some semblance of aggregated tracking, but let’s be honest: how many hotels have the resources—or the technical know-how—to implement it correctly? Misaligned consent management platforms and shaky configurations are the norm, not the exception, leaving hoteliers stranded with incomplete data and ineffective analytics.
And the issues don’t stop there. Social media platforms like Telegram have become black holes for tracking, while the rise of generative AI in search engines has introduced a new challenge. Unlike traditional search results, where clicks and conversions can be tracked, AI-generated answers are a one-way mirror. Impressions might be up, but meaningful engagement is now almost impossible to measure (you can read more here on Hospitality Net. For hotels, this means one thing: their ability to make data-driven decisions is being systematically dismantled.
Even advanced solutions like server-side tracking fail to close the gap, leaving much traffic untracked. While better than nothing, aggregated data paints an incomplete picture, stripping hoteliers of the granular insights they need to make informed decisions.
As a result, hotel owners misinterpret analytics data, believing they are in a crisis when, in reality, overregulation is the problem. I’ve personally seen cases where Google Analytics didn’t track two-thirds of direct booking revenue. The fallout? Panicked hotel owners slashed marketing budgets, ironically reinforcing their dependence on OTAs.
Let’s not mince words: the regulatory landscape is killing hotel marketing as we know it. These rules, far from fostering innovation or protecting consumers, are impeding the ability of hotels to track and optimize their performance.
It’s time for the industry to demand brighter, fairer policies that don’t suffocate innovation or force businesses into a perpetual state of dependency. These regulations must be reimagined, not as barriers, but as enablers for ethical and effective business practices.
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