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Affiliate marketing boosts hotel chain’s online bookings
Macdonalds Hotels and Resorts is aiming to achieve 15% of its revenue online.
The target emerged as the chain with 60 UK hotels revealed that web revenue had grown by 600% a month.
The dramatic rise was attributed to the company appointing performance advertising network AffiliateFuture for its affiliate marketing programme.
More than 90 members of the AffiliateFuture network were featuring Macdonalds hotels on their sites within two weeks of the programme’s launch. Within six weeks it was achieving between £25,000 and £30,000 in bookings a week, making it one of Macdonalds’ primary sources of business from the web, according to the company.
Macdonalds believes affiliate marketing is “all but virgin territory” for the hotel trade.
“It has probably been overlooked by most as a marketing method because room bookings can be cancelled with just 24 hours’ notice at no cost to the booker,” said a spokeswoman.
Now that affiliate marketing has proved itself, the budget is being increased.
The hotel group’s market manager Sally Osborne said: “When we worked with affiliate schemes for hotel bookings in the past we always achieved good results. Cancellations were few and far between and as we developed relationships with affiliates we were able to better tailor our offers which resulted in increased take-up and fewer cancellations still.”
MacDonalds selected AIM-listed AffiliateFuture because it was able to deliver a range of banners, a high number of affiliates and “genuine enthusiasm” for the project. AffiliateFuture’s turnaround times were such that as soon as the chain’s new website was live the affiliate marketing campaign was ready to run.
Report by Phil Davies
Phil Davies
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