To explain, mirror marketing takes places when one or more online travel agencies (including their respective metasearch brands) pay for their sites to appear above the official hotel website when visitors use Google to search for the specific hotel brand name. The desired result is that third-party sites are more visible than the official hotel website, and traffic that had intended to go direct to the hotel website is diverted away. “It’s like letting someone else put their number in place of yours in the phone book,” says Stephen Williams of Gresham Hotels and Windward Management. This greater prominence of the OTA site attracts more clicks and therefore bookings than the hotel site, costing the hotel in commission payments that it would not have incurred had the customer booked direct. Moreover, the loss of traffic for the hotel site results in a drop down the organic (non-paid) search rankings for the hotel website. Get the full story at Tnooz