The hotel and travel industry is suffering from one of the most aggressive issues of online brand and reputation attack, which is rooted firmly around the value of hotel brands and search phrases.

This is seen within primary search results, where 80% or more of branded search traffic on keywords directly related to a hotel’s brand are stolen by directory and trip review sites such as Orbitz, Expedia, TripAdvisor, Priceline, Hotwire, Hotels.com, and TravelPost. There are dozens of smaller sites and sub-properties involved in this marketplace attrition model, high-lighting an ongoing and growing problem.

Needless to say, that this is a monumental issue.

If we want to apply real world numbers to this problem, we can establish a baseline value of traffic redirected by encroaching on branded terms by looking at the monthly unique traffic of the top travel sites dealing with hotels and comparing those numbers against the percentage of traffic originating from search engines.

The chart below list some of the top sites involved in leeching off organic traffic through brand related hotel terms: Read more