Is it worth paying to get a listing on another web site?

I am making this information available to hotels as I get a lot of calls from people wanting advice on whether to pay a fee to web site x, y or z for a link.

Draw your own conclusions, but my advice is that a paid link is unlikely to get you more than 200 visits out of 25,000 that you might expect in a year, and is more likely to be in the range 50 to 100.

To illustrate what you can expect to get from such sites, which are known in the trade as "referral sites" let me construct a typical hotel web site and show where it could get referrals from.

I have based this on the average number of referrals for a given site. For example the figure for the AA is obtained by averaging only those sites that have links to the AA.

In order to avoid naming and shaming particular groups and consortia, I have just called them "consortium A", "Consortium B" etc. I have informed members of A and B if they are a member!

I have taken a typical hotel for a year, and I believe this is what you could expect. I have added country-house-hotels.com for illustrative purposes (you are not paying for it!) which is a similar site to a group site in that it offers browsers the choice of a number of hotels in all parts of the UK.

Check it against your figures for last year !!

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