Bing Hotel Ads moving out of beta to general release with Koddi

The release opens up another paid channel for hotel marketing.

After running its Hotel Ads offering in beta last year, Bing Ads is going to be rolling them out in general release. Bing Ads’ initial partner is travel advertising platform Koddi, which also participated in the beta.

Hotel Ads in Bing results

Bing’s Hotel Ads experience is much like Google’s. The interface gives searchers a fast way to input travel dates and instantly see pricing across different travel engines.

There are also “sort” options so users can look at best match, price or rating. The ratings feature a TripAdvisor integration (which has long been part of Bing’s organic travel and hotel search results) that displays the number of reviews and TripAdvisor ranking of a hotel. Hotel Ads also feature multiple image cards for hotels and an interactive map powered by Bing Maps so users can refine or customize their hotel searches further.

How data is supplied

The hotel data is populated via an XML feed named the Hotel Feed that advertisers assemble, containing data such as hotel name, phone number, address and location.

There is a separate XML feed called the Point of Sale Feed, which details the sites that users can use to book rooms.

Once both feeds are imported, advertisers can then push or pull itinerary data for hotel properties via Transaction Messages.

There will be a new PPC campaign type that is similar to what exists for Shopping. Accounts can be organized into accounts, subaccounts, hotel groups and finally hotels, with multiple levels of bidding available to advertisers.

Koddi advertisers will have access to Bing Hotel Ads through the Koddi platform upon general release.