Cruise passengers, convention crowds, and tourists all reach for Google before they book. We make sure your hotel is what they find, and that the booking comes to you, not an OTA.
Downtown is crowded with hotels, and travellers compare a handful before they book. The work below is about being one of the few they see, on the platforms where they look.
Show up the moment a traveller lands in Vancouver and pulls out their phone.
Get found by cruise passengers booking the night before they sail and the days after.
Google Travel, TripAdvisor, Booking.com. We make sure your listing holds up on all of them.
Conventions, festivals, and game nights fill rooms. We help you catch those searches.
There's no single trick to filling rooms. It's a handful of things done well and kept up. Here's what we handle for Downtown Vancouver hotels.
Downtown is the front door to BC tourism. Cruise terminals, the Convention Centre, and the big attractions all sit within a few blocks of each other, and they keep visitors moving through your area year-round.
From May to October, Canada Place runs ships almost every week. Those passengers need a room the night before they sail and often a few nights after. The hotels they find first get the booking.
Travellers flying in the day before departure, looking for a room near the terminal.
Passengers who add a few days in Vancouver before they head home.
Room-and-attraction bundles that give pre- and post-cruise guests a reason to book direct.
A guest rarely books on the first site they open. They bounce between Google Travel, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com before deciding. We keep your listing strong on all of them so you're still in the running wherever they land.
The Convention Centre runs events all year, and the rooms around it fill up fast. We time your search visibility to the calendar so attendees find you when they're booking.
Premium attendees seeking nearby hotels
Multi-day events with accommodation needs
Canucks games, marathons, tournaments
Celebration of Light, film festivals, concerts
Downtown packs a lot of hotels into a small footprint, from waterfront towers to small business hotels. They all draw from the same pool of cruise passengers, convention crowds, business travellers, and tourists. In a market that tight, online visibility is what fills rooms. The hotels that show up well on Google Travel, Maps, and the booking platforms get the last-minute and direct reservations. The ones that don't rely on the OTAs and pay for it in commission.
Demand isn't flat. It climbs through cruise season (May–October), spikes around big conventions and summer events, and quiets down in winter. Searches like "hotels near me Vancouver", "hotels near cruise terminal", and "best hotels downtown Vancouver" jump when the ships and crowds are in town. Ranking near the top of the local pack and Hotel Ads during those windows is the difference between a full house and empty rooms.
If you know how people actually shop for a room, the SEO work stops being guesswork. Here's the path most guests take before they book.
Booking a hotel isn't one click. A guest searches Google, opens a couple of OTAs to compare, reads a few TripAdvisor reviews, then maybe checks the hotel's own site for a better deal. Most of this happens on a phone, often over a day or two. By the time they book, they've seen your hotel several times across different sites, or they haven't seen it at all.
A room costs more and matters more than a meal out, so people take their time. They study the photos, the reviews, the location, and the price before they commit. Every one of those needs to hold up.
Hotels deal with marketing problems most local businesses never see. Here are the ones that come up again and again, and how we handle each.
Booking.com, Expedia, and Hotels.com send you guests, then take a commission on every one. They're useful for filling gaps, but when most of your bookings come through them, the commission eats your margin. We build up your direct channels through Google Hotel Ads, local SEO, and a booking flow on your own site that's worth using, so a bigger share of bookings comes straight to you.
Parity agreements mean you often can't undercut the OTAs on price, so you have to win on everything else. That's your Google Business Profile, your photos, the perks you offer, and your reviews. We sharpen all of it so guests pick you without you cutting the rate.
Cruise season carries a big chunk of the year, then things go quiet. That feast-or-famine cycle is brutal if you only show up during the rush. We run campaigns that follow the calendar: cruise passengers and summer tourists in the warm months, convention and business travel through the slower ones.
Guests read your reviews across Google, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, and Expedia before they book, and one bad one near the top can cost you weeks of business. We set up a steady habit of asking happy guests to leave a review, and a calm, professional way to respond when something goes wrong.
A hotel has to be present on Google, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Trivago, and its own site, each with its own rules. It's easy for the name, address, phone number, photos, and details to drift out of sync. We keep all of it consistent so you don't lose rankings or confuse a guest mid-booking.
No mystery here. We work in four phases, each building on the last, all aimed at one thing: more direct bookings and fewer empty rooms.
We look at where you stand across Google Hotel Ads, Maps, TripAdvisor, and the OTAs, see what your competitors are doing, read your reviews, and find the proximity searches worth going after (cruise terminal, Convention Centre, the nearby landmarks). Then we map out where your direct bookings leak.
Timeline: Weeks 1–2
We get your Google Business Profile in shape with a strong set of photos, sort out the Hotel Ads integration, add schema for rooms and amenities, fix the details guests check (parking, WiFi, accessibility), and tidy up the direct booking path on your site so it can compete with the OTAs.
Timeline: Weeks 3–6
We set up a routine for asking happy guests to review you on Google and TripAdvisor, often through a post-stay email, and we handle responses so nothing sits unanswered. The point is a steady flow of recent reviews, not one big push that fades.
Timeline: Ongoing from Month 2
We time campaigns to the calendar: cruise season (May–October), conventions, holidays, and big events. Push hard on rate and visibility when demand is high, keep the direct channel working when it's quiet.
Timeline: Months 3–12+
Google visibility usually starts shifting in the first couple of months. Direct bookings follow once the listings are clean and reviews build. SEO compounds, so the longer it runs, the more it pays back, especially heading into cruise season when rooms are at a premium.
See the rest of our digital marketing services or read the latest on the blog.
The things owners and managers want to know before they spend a dollar on search.
Yes, that's the main point of it. When your hotel ranks well on Google, guests can find you and book direct, where you keep the commission an OTA would have taken. We work on your Hotel Ads, your local pack ranking, and the booking path on your own site to move a meaningful share of bookings off the OTAs without losing total volume.
Google visibility usually starts improving in the first couple of months. Direct bookings follow once your listings are clean and reviews build. The quick wins are the Google Business Profile and review work. Competitive keywords take longer. SEO compounds, so the gains get bigger the longer it runs.
Google first. Most hotel searches start there, and it's where booking intent is highest. TripAdvisor still matters, because its reviews feed into how you look on Google and show up in results. We work on both, but the bulk of the return comes from Google.
For getting the booking, yes. Photos don't change your ranking directly, but a full set of good, current ones is often what tips a guest from looking to booking. We make sure both your own property photos and the review photos guests post are working for you across the platforms.
Respond quickly and calmly. Acknowledge the issue, apologise if it's warranted, say what you've done about it, and offer to take it offline. The bigger fix is volume. A steady stream of recent positive reviews keeps any single bad one from defining you. One complaint among many recent positives barely registers. The same complaint among a handful of total reviews does real damage.
Yes. We go after searches like "hotels near Canada Place cruise terminal", "pre-cruise hotel Vancouver", and "post-cruise stay", run campaigns through the May–October window, and build cruise-specific pages so passengers find you when they're booking the nights around their sailing.
Hotel Ads are paid spots that show your rates and availability at the top of hotel searches. SEO is the organic side: your Maps and local pack ranking and your website's visibility, which you don't pay per click for. You want both. Ads catch the guest ready to book now, SEO builds the steady free traffic over time. We run them together.
We target "hotels near Vancouver Convention Centre", build pages for the events that matter to you, and watch the convention calendar so campaigns line up with demand. Convention guests often book months ahead, so the work has to be in place early to catch both the corporate planners and the individual attendees.
Rate parity usually stops you from undercutting on price, but it doesn't stop you from adding value. Free breakfast, a room upgrade, parking, late checkout, a credit to spend on-site. Those perks give guests a reason to book direct without breaking parity. We make sure they're front and centre on your site and in search.
Most downtown hotels spend somewhere in the range of $3,500–$8,000 a month, covering the platform work, review management, and direct booking improvements. Given downtown room rates and the commission you save on every direct booking, moving even a handful of reservations a month off the OTAs tends to cover the cost and then some. Book a free consultation and we'll quote your situation.
Get a free hotel marketing audit. We'll show you where you're losing bookings to the OTAs and to competitors, and what it would take to win them back.
Free audit • Booking platform analysis • Seasonal campaign planning
Cruise passengers and convention visitors don't only book hotels. We also help restaurants, cafes, boutiques, retail stores, gyms, and professional offices nearby.
Local SEO for downtown restaurants. Google Maps, reviews, and reservation-intent keywords.
Mobile 'near me' search, peak-hour visibility, and reviews for downtown cafes.
Seasonal fashion SEO, Instagram-to-store conversion, and event-based campaigns.