Hotel marketing agency: websites and search planned around how lodging prices must be shown

What does a hotel marketing agency do?

A hotel marketing agency plans and runs the ways a property is found and booked online: the website, the Google listing, search results, and the paths that turn a visit into a reservation or an event inquiry. Ours covers three parts. We build the website, with a page for each room type, your offers and your meeting and wedding space. We run search, which includes your Business Profile and a monthly check on how often AI answers mention you. And we build the inquiry path for your events team, so a request reaches the sales manager who handles it.

Some work stays with others. Rates, availability and restrictions live in your property management system, channel manager and booking engine. We don’t replace those and we don’t claim to integrate with a named product. We don’t manage paid ads either: Google’s hotel booking module marks paid links with an “Ads” badge, and that part stays with your team or an ads agency. For a hotel, what we would build starts from one rule: wherever a price shows, the total price shows with it.

Which rules shape how a hotel shows its prices and rooms?

Three rules shape how a hotel shows its prices and rooms. Each part below gives the rule’s scope in its own words, and your counsel decides how it applies to your property, your rates and your fees.

The FTC’s fee rule covers short-term lodging prices

The FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 16 CFR part 464, was published on January 10, 2025, and the Federal Register’s record says “This rule is effective May 12, 2025.” Its scope comes from one definition. A covered good or service is live-event tickets or “short-term lodging, including temporary sleeping accommodations at a hotel, motel, inn, short-term rental, vacation rental, or other place of lodging.”

Section 464.2(a) makes it an unfair and deceptive practice for a business to “offer, display, or advertise any price of a covered good or service without clearly and conspicuously disclosing the total price.” Under 464.2(b), the total price must be disclosed “more prominently than any other pricing information,” and where the final amount of payment is displayed, that amount must be shown more prominently than, or as prominently as, the total price. The rule defines total price as “the maximum total of all fees or charges a consumer must pay,” and lets government charges, shipping charges and fees for optional extras be left out. Before a guest consents to pay, 464.2(c) requires the nature, purpose and amount of any excluded fee, and the final amount of payment.

California’s honest pricing law covers mandatory fees

California’s Honest Pricing Law, SB 478, is found at Civil Code section 1770(a)(29), and the Attorney General’s page says it applies beginning July 1, 2024. The page says the law applies to “the sale or lease of most goods and services that are for a consumer’s personal use,” and names event tickets, short-term rentals, hotels and food delivery platforms “just to name a few prominent industries.” It says the law “does not apply to the purchase or lease of goods or services for commercial use, or to certain other specified transactions and industries that are already subject to other laws governing pricing.”

What it prohibits is “[a]dvertising, displaying, or offering a price for a good or service that does not include all mandatory fees or charges,” other than government-imposed taxes or fees and reasonable shipping costs. The page gives a hotel example: charges for “smoking in a non-smoking hotel room” depend on a guest’s later conduct, so they are not mandatory and need not be in the advertised price. Asked whether disclosing additional required fees before a consumer finalizes a transaction complies, the page answers no: “The advertised or listed price must be the full price that the consumer is required to pay.” The law, the page says, is “a transparency law – not a price control law.”

Section 464.4 says the federal rule doesn’t supersede a state law on unfair or deceptive fees except to the extent of an inconsistency, and that a state law giving consumers greater protection isn’t inconsistent. How the two fit your property is for counsel.

Accessible rooms need their own description and booking path

The ADA’s reservation rule for lodging, 28 CFR 36.302(e)(1), applies to “a public accommodation that owns, leases (or leases to), or operates a place of lodging,” for reservations “made by any means, including by telephone, in-person, or through a third party.” It requires, among other things, that people with disabilities can reserve accessible rooms “during the same hours and in the same manner” as other guests, and that the hotel identify and describe accessible features “in enough detail to reasonably permit individuals with disabilities to assess independently” whether a room meets their needs. Further items on holding, reserving and securing a specific accessible room follow in the same paragraph.

The description is words only your staff can write and approve, since they know the rooms. A site we would build gives each room type a place for your approved accessibility description and a plain route to book, and it doesn’t decide what is accessible. How accessible rooms are held and reserved is a question for your reservation system, so we’d ask your booking engine vendor about it on the call.

What should a hotel website show?

A site we would build gives each room type a page, with the rate and the total price first, the fees spelled out, the cancellation, pet and parking policies, directions, and a way to book an accessible room. The page plan, the booking path and what a build involves are on hotel website design.

How does search work for a hotel?

Google sorts lodging into three categories: hotels, vacation rentals and outdoor lodging, which includes campgrounds and RV parks. It says the category decides which searches a property appears in, and that a name like “Main Street Hotel” doesn’t set it. Google’s local ranking help says there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Its hotel help says hotels can’t edit their listed hours, and restaurants and spas open to the public inside a hotel can have profiles of their own.

The category tests, the booking-link rules and the monthly work are on hotel SEO.

How do hotels and wedding venues market their event space?

A wedding or meeting inquiry carries different details from a room booking: a date, a headcount and the kind of event. In The Knot’s study of couples married in 2025, 37% reached out to more vendors than initially planned to find options that fit within their budget. It also found AI use among engaged couples at 36%, mainly for inspiration, early questions and drafting communications, before they turned to trusted industry platforms to validate details and make final decisions.

For wedding venue marketing and for corporate meetings, we would build a page for each space, an inquiry form that asks for the date, the guest count and the kind of event, and routing that sends each request to the sales manager for that event type. Where you keep an availability calendar, the form can show open dates. Site tours could be booked from the open times you set. Catering menus sit on their own pages and state what the price includes. Wedding venue SEO starts like hotel search, with a page for each space and an accurate Business Profile; Google’s guidelines list event venues among the businesses that shouldn’t provide hours there. Wedding venue website design uses the same site as the rooms, set out on hotel website design.

Pricing for events comes with a scope note. The Attorney General’s page says SB 478 does not apply to the purchase or lease of goods or services “for commercial use,” and that most of its rules do not apply to the sale of individual food or beverage items by a restaurant, bar, food concession or grocery store, or “pursuant to a banquet or catering services contract or menu.” Whether a wedding, a corporate meeting or a group block sits inside the law is a question for your counsel. For planners who book venues, see event planners.

What should you check before you hire an agency?

Start with who writes the price wording. Ask who keeps the fee lines matched to your rate display, who checks a change before it goes live, and who tells your counsel when a fee changes. Ask who writes the accessible-room descriptions; it should be your staff, with the agency building the place for them.

Then the working basics. Ask whose name the domain is registered in, and who holds the logins for your Business Profile and Search Console; both should be yours. Ask which booking engine and connectivity partner the agency expects to work around, and what it asks of your vendor.

How do you measure what hotel marketing brings in?

Start with reservations and event inquiries, then look at visits. Your booking engine counts reservations, so ask for them by source; phone calls and walk-in inquiries need a log of their own, by how each caller found you. On a site we build, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are connected from launch day, and monthly search work ends with a one-page report that opens with the requests and reservations that came from search. What a website costs is on website design cost, and what monthly search work costs is on SEO pricing.

How does working with us start?

With a 15-minute call. You talk with Nicolas Perez or Noah Alvarez, our co-founders, about your property, your events and the work you want more of. Bring the address of your current site and the name of your booking engine. A written proposal follows.

Midnite Systems was formed in 2023 and works with businesses across the US from our office in Valencia. Book a 15-minute call when you’re ready.