Hotel marketing podcast · Episode 19 Why great hotels look bad online
Eduard Ruppel, founder of Leppur Marketing and a hotel operator for over 20 years with Aman, The Peninsula and Radisson, talks with Daniel Laurean about hotel marketing in the AI era.
Watch the episode
39 minutes, 32 chapters
Play it here or on YouTube. The chapter list below jumps to each part of the conversation.
In this episode
Many hotels lose guests before anyone reaches the lobby. Eduard Ruppel joins Daniel Laurean to talk about why great hotels look so bad online and what to fix first: the website as a digital lobby, friction in the booking journey, room pages that AI assistants recommend, and why every fact about your hotel has to match everywhere online.
Five takeaways for hotel owners
Treat your website as your lobby
Your website is your digital lobby, and more people will visit your digital lobby than they will ever come to your original lobby.
Eduard Ruppel, 2:38
Write room pages that answer real questions
Eduard’s team rebuilt one room page with about 1,800 words and 69 FAQs, based on what housekeeping, the front office and the engineers said guests ask about.
It was indexed within 48 hours, and within 48 hours ChatGPT recommended this family room directly.
Eduard Ruppel, 14:14
Put your location in the H1
You need to put the location in the H1 header, which is the most important header.
Eduard Ruppel, 16:54
Don’t skip YouTube for ChatGPT
You can get more traffic … from YouTube than you can get from ChatGPT. We see the numbers with our clients.
Eduard Ruppel, 24:07
Make your facts match everywhere
Opening hours, the number of rooms and every other detail should read the same on every site that mentions your hotel.
If you have 98 rooms, make sure it’s everywhere 98 rooms. This is work, but you need to do it, because otherwise AIs are confused.
Eduard Ruppel, 38:23
Quotes are as spoken in the episode, with filler words such as “you know” left out.
Chapters
- 0:00 Intro
- 0:59 Meet Eduard Ruppel
- 1:32 Great hotels, weak online presence
- 2:38 Your website is your digital lobby
- 3:30 Why hotels start at step three: OTA dependency
- 4:48 Why hotels need hospitality-specialist agencies
- 5:46 Beautiful websites with no SEO
- 6:48 Why the hotel booking journey is so painful
- 8:06 Choosing a booking engine for a boutique hotel
- 10:13 Tracking the booking journey in GA4
- 12:04 How guests choose a boutique hotel today
- 13:01 Designing your website for humans and AI
- 13:43 150 words for a two-floor junior suite?
- 14:02 The room page ChatGPT recommended in 48 hours
- 15:25 SEO vs GEO: where hotel traffic comes from
- 16:50 Put your location in the H1
- 17:58 Be the local guide for your area
- 18:36 Speed, technical SEO and mobile
- 19:50 Why every hotel looks the same online
- 20:23 The remove-the-logo test
- 21:13 Boutique hotels can test, chains can’t
- 22:37 The pre-arrival podcast idea
- 23:43 YouTube vs ChatGPT for hotel traffic
- 24:50 Convincing an owner to take the risk
- 26:11 Google Business Profile posts: free views
- 27:14 Not replying to reviews: shame on you
- 29:24 Ask housekeeping and the front office
- 32:08 What to ask an SEO agency before signing
- 33:27 Honest timelines: SEO KPIs at month three
- 36:02 Rapid fire
- 37:40 Reddit, consistency and what AI says about you
- 38:46 Where to find Eduard Ruppel
About Eduard Ruppel
Eduard Ruppel is the founder and managing director of Leppur Marketing, a hotel SEO agency for boutique and independent hotels. Before that, Eduard spent more than 20 years in hotel and restaurant operations across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, with Radisson, Aman, The Peninsula and Kurumba. Find Eduard on LinkedIn.
Related on resaco.co
From the episode
Questions answered in this episode
The hotel’s location. Eduard’s advice is to put where you are in the H1, the most important heading on the page, so Google and AI tools can tell straight away what kind of hotel you are and where (16:50).
No. Asked for the most overrated tactic, Eduard named jumping into GEO without proper SEO, and called local basic SEO the most underrated. Eduard also sees very little hotel traffic coming from ChatGPT so far (23:43 and 36:02).
Ask to see the clients they work with, recent case studies and results (client names can be masked) and the web pages they have built. Then ask who else they work with: an agency that serves hotels today and a tyre shop tomorrow may not understand your business (32:08).
Keep every fact the same everywhere online, from opening hours to the number of rooms, and check what people say about your hotel and your city on Reddit. Conflicting details confuse AI tools, and they end up giving out wrong information (37:40).
Because the Google Business Profile doesn’t belong to you. As Eduard puts it, it is rented to you from Google, and a guest who leaves a review is Google’s customer too. Eduard describes an 85-year-old guest whose long review, with photos, never got a reply (27:14).
Free 45-minute analysis
Want a second opinion on your hotel’s website?
We look at your booking data and your website with you and tell you what we would fix first.