Free 12 Months of SEO Strategy to Help Your Business Grow – No Strings Attached. Claim it now
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Serenity Hostels runs a group of hostels across several Indian travel destinations, with a strong reputation among backpackers and long-stay travellers. Occupancy was healthy — but most of it arrived through online travel agencies, which took a significant commission on every booking. Guests were finding the hostels. They just weren’t finding them on Serenity’s own site.
direct bookings
avg. position, destination terms
AI itinerary citations
Every booking that came through a platform cost the same room a meaningful share of its revenue.
01
OTAs outranked the brand
Searching a Serenity property by name returned booking platforms above the hostel's own site. Guests who specifically wanted Serenity still booked through an intermediary, and the commission came out of the same room.
02
Absent from trip planning
Travellers start with 'where to stay in' and 'things to do in' searches long before they book. That planning stage was owned entirely by travel blogs and aggregators, so Serenity only entered the picture once a platform had already framed the choice.
03
No reason to book direct
The site listed rooms and a booking form, with nothing a platform couldn't offer. Guests had no reason to switch, and the site made no case for why they should.
Local, international and answer-engine work, sequenced so the fastest wins funded the slower ones.
Travellers search at three different distances from a decision, and we built for each: inspiration (‘best places to visit in Goa’), planning (‘where to stay in Anjuna’), and booking (‘Anjuna hostel with private rooms’). Previously every one of these landed on a generic property page. Now inspiration content earns the visit, planning pages narrow the choice toward a Serenity location, and booking pages close it — with internal links carrying travellers through that sequence.
We restructured the site around destinations rather than properties. Each destination is a hub covering the area, what to do there, how to get around and where to stay, with the Serenity property sitting inside that context. This matches how travellers actually search — they choose a place before they choose a bed — and it gives every property a topically relevant hub supporting it rather than a standalone page competing alone.
Generated at scale from structured location and property data: neighbourhood guides for each area Serenity operates in, 'hostels near [landmark]' pages for the landmarks travellers actually search, and stay-type pages crossing destination with room type and traveller type. Each is populated with genuine local detail — distances, transport, nearby spots — rather than spun text, so they hold up as useful pages and rank on their own merit.
We targeted the sources travellers and AI engines both rely on: independent travel bloggers, backpacker community sites, regional tourism boards and digital-nomad guides. The pitch was hosted stays and genuinely useful local information rather than link requests, which produced editorial coverage instead of directory listings. These are also the exact sources that surface in AI travel recommendations.
We traced the path from destination guide to confirmed booking and found travellers were leaving at the date and availability step, then completing the booking on an OTA instead. Live availability moved into the destination and property pages, the booking flow was cut to three steps, and a direct-booking benefit — lower rate, flexible check-in, free cancellation — is now stated at every stage. Direct booking completion rate roughly doubled.
Property pages were rebuilt around what a traveller actually decides on: real photos of real rooms, honest distances to the places they care about, what the social atmosphere is like, and clear pricing. Reviews were pulled in and shown prominently, and the direct-booking advantage is stated plainly rather than buried in a footer. Bounce rate on property pages fell sharply.
Titles and descriptions were rewritten to compete with OTA listings in the result set — leading with location specificity, price from, and the direct-booking advantage rather than the brand name alone. Hotel and review schema earn star ratings and pricing in results. On brand searches in particular, where an OTA listing previously took the click, Serenity now takes a clear majority of it.
The shift from platform bookings to direct bookings changed the economics of every room.
Bookings made on Serenity's own site rather than through a travel platform.
Across destination, neighbourhood and property search terms.
Serenity now appears inside Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity travel itineraries for its destinations.
Proportion of total bookings paying platform commission, down over the engagement.