Our shared goal is simple: to deliver great guest experiences. From the booking experience to the stay itself, the value and experience you provide guests helps determine your visibility and performance in our marketplace.
Improve the visibility of your property
Your visibility performance
On the visibility performance page in Partner Central, you’ll find your visibility factors. These factors help you understand the elements of your offer strength and guest experience combined with other factors, such as the compensation we receive, that impact your sort order, and include clear recommendations on how you can deliver a better traveler experience. The visibility metrics feature allows you to see more details about how your scores affect your property’s sort order, such as your search view rate and average position in sort.
The better experience you provide throughout the traveler journey, the higher you may appear in search results and the more visible you’ll be to travelers.
Improve your offer strength
Recommendations explain how to optimize your listing content, rates, and availability
Deliver great guest experiences
Insights from reviews identify areas of the stay experience your guests enjoy — and the areas to improve
Offer strength factors
In a span of seconds, travelers deduce whether your property is a fit for their needs. Complete listing content and competitive pricing and availability ensure you make your best first impression. To help you provide the information travelers need, our tool will:
- Alert you when we see discrepancies between your room availability, inventory, and rates on our booking websites and other travel websites
- Assess the completeness of your listing content, including photos, property description, guest policies, and fees, to set the right expectations with your guests
- Provide tips to optimize your offer strength, so you can make improvements quickly
Read more about the factors that determine your offer strength — and how to improve them — here.
Guest experience factors
The guest experience you provide plays a significant role in where your property appears in search results. To help you understand how to better serve your guests, our tool:
- Analyzes data from your recent guest ratings and reviews, preventable cancellations, and relocation and refund rates
- Provides you with a clear view of how your guests perceive different areas of their experience, including check-in, customer service, cleanliness, amenities, and more
Learn more about these factors and find resources to help you deliver great guest experiences here.
Improve your sort order
See the visibility factors and what you can do to achieve the best results in our marketplace.
How is our marketplace evolving?
Our commitment is to put the traveler at the heart of everything we do. As traveler expectations evolve over time, so too does our marketplace. We are continually optimizing to better address traveler needs and to highlight specific actions you can take to best address these needs.
As a first step, a wider set of signals will be used to determine your visibility in our marketplace. From rate competitiveness to guest reviews, these signals indicate a greater likelihood of great guest experiences and repeat stays.
When you consistently deliver positive experiences for guests, your listings will stand out more, so travelers can be confident they’ll have a great experience when choosing to book with you.
What’s changing this year?
As of 2022, our data scientists apply advanced machine learning to our proprietary search algorithm to determine search relevancy, or how well your property matches a traveler’s search criteria. The proprietary algorithm also ensures that the strongest offers — the ones most likely to convert to bookings — show at the top of traveler search results.
Taken together, search relevancy, your offer strength and guest experience scores, and the additional tools you leverage, such as Accelerator or TravelAds, influence your final placement in search results today.
From amenities, policies, and rate competitiveness to traveler reviews and customer support, we’re constantly exploring more signals that indicate a greater likelihood of a happy guest and repeat stays.
Throughout 2023, new capabilities will be added as we continue to improve the experience, including:
- Two new metrics to measure the guest experience: check-in ratings and preventable cancellations
- A TravelAds integration that rewards partners who provide great guest experiences with extra visibility boosts in sponsored campaigns
- Integrating guest experience throughout the traveler journey across our websites
- ...and more!
FAQs
The detail you share about your property – types of amenities, services, policies, and proximity to popular sites – is used when travelers narrow a search to find an accommodation that meets their specific needs. Excellent photos and information about your surroundings help travelers imagine staying with you and prompt them to book their stay.
Thorough, accurate, and engaging listing content ensures travelers have the information they need to make a booking decision. Your focus providing a great experience for travelers, from planning through stay, helps your property appear higher in search results and gives you more visibility with travelers. Read more about how your listing content impacts your sort order here.
Read our article: “6 tips to improve your property listing”.
For more property-specific tips, review the recommendations in Content Score in Partner Central. Your Content Score confirms you have crafted a high performing listing for our websites and allows you to compare the quality of your content to comparable properties in your market.
From the booking experience to the stay itself, the experience you provide guests determines your visibility and performance in our marketplace. See the visibility factors that impact your sort order here.
Guest reviews are one of many factors we look at to understand what properties provide great guest experiences. For these factors, we look at your average rating across time and give recent reviews higher importance and older reviews lesser importance, so that with every effort you make to improve you’ll see an impact sooner.
These guest experience factors are displayed on the visibility performance page in Partner Central. From check-in ratings to cleanliness, these play a role in where your property appears in search results. Learn more about guest experience and visibility factors in this article.
Check out this great overview video on how guest reviews work on the Expedia Group sites. Reviews will appear first on the booking website, e.g., Hotels.com or Expedia.com, and, after 90 days, they’ll display across all the sites in our marketplace.
Learn how to avoid guest relocations in Partner Central. To eliminate same-day arrivals, consider setting a booking cutoff restriction to specify how many days in advance a guest must book before check-in. Read more on how to do this here. Always remember to close room types that are not available for booking and update your properties status to indicate unexpected closures.
You can make updates to your comp set every 15 days to keep pace with changes in your market.
Steps for customizing your competitive set are available here.
Your visibility factors in Partner Central show you factors that contribute to your offer strength. Our tool alerts you to missing information, rate discrepancies, and more, so you can rest assured you are putting your best foot forward with guests and improving your placement in sort. Learn more about visibility factors here.
We're one of the world’s leading travel marketplaces, with an extensive brand portfolio that includes both globally recognized and locally relevant travel brands, including Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, and more. Learn more in our About Us section.
Welcome! Thank you for joining Expedia Group! Your success is our top priority. Find best-practice tips for new partners here - you'll be attracting the best guests for your property in no time!
