The travel sector in Spain is experiencing a period of remarkable growth. According to Grand View Research, the market generated $41.95 billion in revenue in 2024 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 16.7% from 2025 to 2030. This surge in both domestic and international tourism presents a golden opportunity for independent hotels across the region to maximize revenue and profitability. 

However, achieving this requires a strategic approach to distribution that leverages the strengths of both Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) and direct booking channels. By embracing user-friendly digital marketing tools and technologies, hotels can achieve the ideal marketing mix and optimize their revenue streams.

The Power of a Balanced Approach

While the pursuit of direct bookings is essential for maximizing profit margins and building guest loyalty, OTAs play a crucial role in expanding reach and driving occupancy, particularly during periods of low demand. A balanced distribution strategy recognizes the value of both channels and seeks to leverage their respective strengths:

OTAs: Expanding Reach and Filling Rooms

• Increased visibility: OTAs have a vast global reach and established brand recognition, exposing hotels to a wider audience of potential guests.
• Marketing power: OTAs invest heavily in marketing and advertising, driving traffic to their platforms and, in turn, to the hotels they feature.
• Simplified guest acquisition: OTAs provide a seamless booking experience for guests, handling payment processing, customer service, and other logistical aspects.

Direct Bookings: Building Loyalty and Maximizing Revenue

• Higher profit margins: Direct bookings eliminate OTA commission fees, significantly increasing revenue potential.
• Guest ownership: Direct bookings allow hotels to collect valuable guest data, enabling personalized communication, targeted marketing campaigns, and the cultivation of lasting relationships.
• Brand control: Direct channels provide hotels with greater control over their brand messaging and guest experience.

Digital+ by DerbySoft: Simplifying Digital Marketing for Optimal Results

Achieving the ideal marketing mix requires effective digital marketing strategies that drive traffic to both OTAs and direct booking channels. Digital+, a sophisticated platform developed by DerbySoft, empowers independent hotels globally to navigate the complexities of online marketing with ease.

Key Features and Benefits for Hoteliers:

• Unified platform, streamlined operations: Digital+ consolidates all essential marketing activities into a single, intuitive interface. This simplifies campaign management across various channels, allowing hoteliers to optimize their efforts without needing extensive marketing expertise.
• AI-driven optimization: Artificial intelligence is at the core of Digital+. This technology automates complex tasks such as ad copy generation, bid management, and audience targeting, ensuring optimal campaign performance and maximizing return on investment.
• Cost-effectiveness and transparency: Digital+ offers a compelling value proposition. Free Booking Links for leading metasearch engines like Google Hotel Ads and Trivago ensure visibility without upfront costs. Furthermore, the commission-based model means hotels only pay for confirmed bookings, minimizing financial risk.
• Adaptability to industry evolution: Digital+ is designed to keep pace with the ever-changing digital landscape. It facilitates the effective utilization of Google’s Performance Max for travel goals, enabling hotels to reach a broader audience with personalized ads across Google’s entire advertising network.
• Metasearch dominance: In key markets like Spain, where travelers increasingly rely on metasearch engines to compare prices and availability, Digital+ provides a significant advantage. The platform optimizes campaigns on key metasearch platforms, ensuring prominent visibility and driving both direct and OTA bookings.

Targeting the Global Traveler

Independent hotels worldwide, including those in Spain, must adopt a holistic approach to distribution, recognizing the value of both OTAs and direct bookings. Digital+ offers the tools and technology necessary to achieve this balance. By embracing this innovative solution, hotels can:

• Optimize revenue streams: By effectively managing both OTA and direct booking channels, hotels can maximize occupancy and revenue.
• Enhance brand visibility: A strong online presence and consistent brand messaging across all platforms build brand recognition and customer loyalty.
• Optimize marketing spend: AI-driven optimization ensures that marketing budgets are utilized effectively, maximizing return on investment across all channels.
• Navigate the digital landscape with confidence: Digital+ provides the tools and support needed to stay ahead of industry trends and adapt to evolving challenges.

Digital+ is more than just a marketing tool; it is a strategic asset for independent hotels worldwide looking to thrive in the digital age. Whether in Spain, Europe, or global markets, hotels that embrace this technology and adopt a data-driven, balanced approach to distribution can unlock their full potential, optimize revenue, and secure a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic travel landscape.

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DerbySoft converges the diverse elements of travel, creating a unified and efficient ecosystem of connectivity services, high-performing AI-driven marketing solutions, and an end-to-end content platform.

In today’s hyper-competitive hospitality landscape, hotels can no longer rely on a “build it and they will come” mindset. The hunger for travel is insatiable, but the demand for a hyper-personalized experience that starts long before a potential traveler clicks ‘book now’ has hit an all-time high. In this market, loyalty must be earned – not given, and digital marketing is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

As hotels face increased competition from both traditional rivals and alternative lodging options, like Airbnb, capturing demand at scale has become more important than ever – but it’s also increasingly complex. What was once a straightforward task of promoting rooms and services has evolved into a sophisticated, data-driven effort to capture attention, appeal to individual guest preferences, and establish meaningful relationships. With personalization now at the core of guest expectations, the ability to deliver targeted, timely marketing across multiple channels is the key to driving bookings. For hoteliers, the challenge is not just how to execute these strategies, but how to do so efficiently and at scale, while ensuring return on investment.

The Evolution of Digital Marketing in Hospitality

The rise of the internet and the emergence of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) in the late 1990s reshaped how travelers searched for accommodations, and the emergence of digital-first marketing strategies quickly became inevitable. As digital touchpoints usher in new norms of convenience and personalization, attention has become a commodity, and hotels must meet prospective guests where they are (online) if they hope to capture their interest. After all, travelers begin their ‘planning’ journey via multiple online sources, from social media inspiration to online research and reviews, long before they ever finalize the details of their next trip.

To this effect,  research from Expedia revealed that travelers spend an average of 303 minutes, or over 5 hours, engaging with travel content in the 45 days leading up to a booking decision. 

Moreover, that research found that travelers utilize an increasingly diverse range of online resources during their planning process, including:

• 80% of travelers rely on Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)
• 61% turn to search engines
• 58% use social media for inspiration
• 54% visit airline websites
• 51% explore meta travel websites

The digital landscape is vast – but it can also make for a fragmented journey, and travelers embark on an extensive period of research while considering their next destination. With this in mind, hotels must establish a strong online presence to connect with guests at each point in their pre-booking journey, by focusing on owned, earned and paid digital channels.

The Best of Both Worlds: Direct Bookings and OTAs

The tug-of-war between hospitality brands and OTAs is not new, and it won’t end anytime soon. OTAs have been the fastest-growing distribution channel in the tours, activities, and attractions space over the past decade. Still, throughout the pandemic, travelers demonstrated a renewed preference for direct bookings. During recessionary periods, however, OTAs typically experience an uptick in performance as guests become more cost-conscious.

Direct bookings allow hotels to capture more revenue per booking and establish direct relationships with guests, which provides opportunities for upselling and personalization that may otherwise be missed. At the same time, however, direct channels alone can limit a hotel’s reach, as OTAs have a global presence and extensive marketing budgets. Through OTAs, hotels can reach guests who might not otherwise consider their property.

Hotels should always employ tactics to increase direct bookings; however, they should  also strike a balance between OTAs and direct bookings by leveraging OTAs as an entry point to reach a broader audience, capturing first-time guests who may later be converted into loyal, direct bookers. By promoting direct booking benefits, such as exclusive discounts or tailored packages, hotels can encourage repeat guests  for future stays, thus cultivating stronger, more personalized relationships. When hotels establish a healthy balance between both channels, they can preserve their brand identity, maintain control of guest data, and ultimately drive more sustainable revenue growth across all booking platforms.

How Technology Empowers Hotels to Scale and Optimize Digital Marketing

Fortunately, the embrace of digital-first marketing strategies allows hotels to collect valuable guest data, enabling a far more impactful and scalable result than traditional, one-size-fits-all campaigns of the past. After all, expanding marketing reach across diverse markets, languages, and cultural nuances while ensuring that campaigns remain relevant and personalized is no small task. This process requires sophisticated data integration and tech-enabled automation, where guest preferences, booking behaviors, and regional trends are all captured, interpreted, and automatically leveraged to tailor marketing messages.

Notably, digital marketing technology has become more cost effective and measurable than legacy methods, largely due to its iterative design. Digital campaigns can be tracked and adjusted in real time, allowing hotels to pull in guest data from various touchpoints, optimize their marketing spend, and improve return on investment (ROI). Unlike the “spray and pray” tactics of the past, a dedicated digital marketing platform offers A/B testing, audience segmentation, and budget allocation to achieve better, measurable outcomes.What’s more, hotels can accelerate (and automate) the deployment of promotions across multiple channels, without the need for tedious, individual reviews across disconnected platforms. Using a centralized system, designed specifically for marketing to travelers, hotels can ensure consistent messaging across all channels, while eliminating inefficient and repetitive workflows.

As the saying goes – you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and the use of digital marketing technology unlocks deeper insights, providing hotels with customizable, automated reports. These performance summaries provide hotels with a roadmap to refine their strategies, improve bookings, and build stronger guest loyalty. It should come as no surprise, then, that research from the HotelTechReport revealed that 81% of hoteliers believe it’s very likely that technology will be more important for the success of a hotel business in the next five years.

In today’s fast-paced, data-driven world, hotels that fail to embrace digital marketing automation risk being left behind. By leveraging powerful digital marketing platforms, hotels can seamlessly navigate the otherwise complex world of modern guest expectations, efficiently manage multi-channel campaigns, and strike the right balance between direct bookings and OTA visibility. With the right digital marketing automation platform, hotels will not only drive demand at scale – they will also foster meaningful, lasting relationships with their guests while curating stronger brand identities.

About the Author

Toni Marti is a highly accomplished digital marketing and strategic management professional with a career spanning over a decade in the Travel, Hospitality, and Retail sectors. Since 2015, Toni has served as the Global Head of Channel Partnerships at DerbySoft, where he leads the development and management of strategic relationships with global channel partners.

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DerbySoft converges the diverse elements of travel, creating a unified and efficient ecosystem of connectivity services, high-performing AI-driven marketing solutions, and an end-to-end content platform.

WeChat “mini-programs” are starting to take off in China’s social media world, where the messaging platform dominates the market. Some hotels developing mini-programs find they rank among their best-performing direct channels, bringing in a large number of bookings from outbound Chinese travelers.

While little-known outside the country, the messaging and social media app WeChat is one of the world’s largest mobile messaging services, with similar transaction volume as WhatsApp and Facebook. According to the Economist, WeChat has more than 900 million daily users who send 38 billion messages per day. Fast Company calls WeChat China’s “app for everything” — in a country where credit cards are rare, and cash has been king, people use WeChat to shop online, pay for purchases at physical stores, book tickets, make appointments, pay their utility bills, and more.

WeChat mini-programs act like apps –– except they live in the cloud and don’t have to be downloaded, so users save on data and storage space. They’re inserted or embedded in a WeChat promotional article easily, just as you would paste a URL link. There are more than 400 million total WeChat mini-program users, 170 million of them daily users.

Case Study: How DerbySoft Built a Successful WeChat Mini-Program for Club Med

DerbySoft, a company that provides high-performance distribution services across the hospitality sector, used WeChat mini-programs to develop real-time booking and online payment functionality for Club Med and helped the brand tap into China. By connecting Club Med’s mini-program to the resort’s real-time availability, room rates, and inventory, users can search, book, and make online payments to 16 Club Med resorts across China, Asia, and the Indian Ocean through the WeChat app.

As Olivia Chen, vice president of marketing & omni channel China, at Club Med, explained, “DerbySoft took only three weeks to develop the WeChat mini-program, integrating with Club Med’s central reservation system to connect the resorts’ real-time available rates and inventory to the WeChat mini-program. … Our global customers can search and book any of our resorts by using the mini-program.”

Three months after DerbySoft helped Club Med launch the new WeChat mini-program, average monthly traffic had taken off. Traffic increased 40 percent per month and provided a very high ROI. “The mini-program has led to the rapid growth of our WeChat direct sales, and collaboration with DerbySoft has led to a win-win situation for both sides,” said Chen.

WeChat mini-programs offer a promising distribution model for hotels to drive bookings among Chinese travelers. However, to act as a direct sales channel, they must connect to the hotel’s central reservation system to provide accurate, real-time availability, room rates, and inventory.

Because of this, there are important considerations that hotels should make before hiring someone to create a WeChat mini-program. The developer must be qualified and able to carefully and thoughtfully plan functions such as user interface design, search, booking, and cancellation features.

It’s also beneficial to have a localized availability cache. When a hotel promotes its mini-program through a high-volume media channel, a significant amount of traffic flows in a very short time from the mini-program to the central reservation system. A localized caching service can redirect this surge of traffic to caching servers, and reduce direct impact on the central reservation system. Just before confirming a booking, the system performs a live check between the cached and live central reservation system data to make sure there are no price discrepancies. When a WeChat user confirms the booking, the information is sent to the central reservation system.

A mini-program developer must also be up on online network data security — all online businesses must follow both Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) certification and GDPR, which guide data security and privacy for users — as well as integration between the mini-program and the brand’s loyalty program, and currency conversion and settlement.

Currently, WeChat only supports settlement in RMB –– the official currency of the People’s Republic of China –– so foreign hotels wanting to be part of a WeChat mini-program need currency conversion. DerbySoft can both convert various currencies to RMB and also help hotels make an RMB settlement.

Having proven their success in China as effective selling channels for hotels, WeChat mini-programs seem poised for even more growth. Digital Boot Camp Asia, a marketing company that specializes in companies doing business in Asia, asserts that WeChat mini-programs currently have almost limitless potential in China.

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DerbySoft converges the diverse elements of travel, creating a unified and efficient ecosystem of connectivity services, high-performing AI-driven marketing solutions, and an end-to-end content platform.