We’ve been noticing Hotel Price Ad Commercial Units being displayed in Google Flights. In the sidebar, hotels are displayed for the destination city the user inputs. Stay tuned for more on how these hotels are selected to be shown in the ads, but we have confirmed that they are different than the properties that are displayed in the Hotel Finder ad slots and the commercial ad in SERPs.

Not Your Typical Ad Unit

When a user clicks on a specific hotel in the ad unit, they are taken to a Hotel Finder result page, not the specific hotel detail page. The hotel the user selected is shown in the first organic spot below the ad slots on Hotel Finder.

Note – Though this is called an ad, it is not something that advertisers can bid on. Instead, think of it like Google’s own ad that generates incoming traffic to Hotel Price Ads.

If a user clicks any link other than a hotel name, they are taken to the hotel finder result page where the organic results are displayed normally.

In the example below, the Phoenix hotel was clicked in the ad unit. The resulting page had Hotel Finder ads, then the selected hotel in the 1st organic spot.

What It Means For Hotel Advertisers

Big Picture

By now, you might be getting sick of hearing from us on how often Google is iterating and testing new features with HPAs, but it’s just amazing how much steam is behind this vertical. Here at Koddi, it’s our duty to make sure hospitality marketers are aware of the changes, and are prepared for the exponential growth. These rapid iterations and tests show that this Google is taking travel seriously.

Smaller(ish) Picture

Specifically, the interaction between Google Flights and Hotels makes showing up in the ad slots of hotel finder pages even more important. These are not ads that you can explicitly bid on (just like the HPA commercial unit in Google Flights). The exact ranking factors for a property to show up is not provided by Google, however you can expect that more aggressive bid strategies will have a greater likelihood of showing up in ad slots.
+Trent