BestBookDirect Celebrates 12th Anniversary with Significant Booking Growth

CUMBRIA, UK. 29th July, 2024 - BestBookDirect.com, the UK-based travel website focused on driving direct bookings for both hotel and holiday companies, has announced significant growth in its business for the first half of the year.

Having originally started out promoting just the Premier Inn brand for Whitbread over 15 years ago, the group has since evolved to encompass a broad base of both hotel and holiday partners throughout the UK. Its current portfolio includes Warner Hotels, Travelodge, Haven Holiday Parks, Macdonald Hotels, and the Best Western group.

The website was initially set up as an alternative to the large, mainly American-owned Online Travel Agents (OTAs) such as Tripadvisor and Booking.com. These large OTAs utilise enormous marketing budgets to dominate Google search results but demand high percentages of any bookings they generate. Hotels and holiday providers not using OTAs often struggle to attain consistent top placement in Google’s organic search results if they rely solely on their in-house website, as they find themselves outcompeted and lacking the budget to invest the large sums required into search engine optimisation.

BestBookDirect.com specialises in securing first-page organic results for its partner travel affiliates and uses an ‘only-pay-on-sales-driven’ business model. This sees it taking just a small fraction, typically less than 5%, of the total booking cost compared to the average 15-30% demanded by the OTAs. This approach consistently delivers higher direct bookings for the partner company, helping to boost both profitability and their overall bottom line.

Chris Cottam, Head of Digital Operations at BestBookDirect.com, said, “In our twelfth year, the business has reached a significant milestone in which we have seen an incredible 200% year-on-year growth in our delivery of direct bookings for Warner Hotels alongside an increase in bookings across all 38 Haven Holiday Parks throughout the UK. This has been achieved by a keen focus on promoting late/last-minute deals on unsold rooms, which are a priority for all hospitality operators as they strive for maximum room occupancy levels. With dedicated high-quality web pages featuring both Warner’s last-minute room deals and Haven Holiday Parks, we aim to fill unsold capacity in the most cost-effective manner. We now aim to replicate this success with our other travel and hospitality partners.”

The business also has a strong focus on supporting charities in the UK, and BestBookDirect’s parent company, Uedit Limited, raised over £100,000 to support disadvantaged children in the UK by sharing its technology platform with the school fundraising charity School Angel.

For more information visit www.bestbookdirect.com