Market entry in Booking.com’s shadow, all the way to an €82 million exit

Introduction

The Markestic team supported Noclegi.pl for five years, from 2018 to 2023. In the beginning their operation was loss-making, which the 2020 COVID pandemic made worse. The plan, to break into the Polish market, was full of challenges.

We consider it a huge success that, through our joint efforts, the site became profitable after the first few years, and the entire group was eventually acquired at a very high valuation, for a total of €82 million.

Challenge

The group faced a serious decision: grow or exit? Online travel is one of the most competitive and most developed industries, where small local players cannot stay in the race for long against the international giants.

Backed by its Hungarian operation, the group decided to enter the Polish market, which is four times larger and far more competitive than the home market. Beyond the general challenges of entering a new country, COVID also hit the online travel industry hard.

Solution

Because of limited financial and human resources, we did not target every market segment: we concentrated on selected niche markets, specific geographic locations and accommodation types, made those profitable, and scaled the operation from there.

Every settlement type (region, town, village) and accommodation type (hotel, hostel and the rest) had to be loaded into the ad accounts, along with numerous geographic targets, since bookings in Poland could come from more than just the local market. The complexity was increased further by the fact that Noclegi.pl also offers accommodation in other countries. This resulted in several million targeted keywords, which we placed systematically in the Google Ads account, with a clean structure, plus automations and scripts to keep an account this size running smoothly.

Alongside Google Ads we used a much wider PPC channel mix: Hotel Price Ads, Facebook Ads, Criteo, RTB House, Trivago, Seznam and the testing of several further platforms. During COVID, at the time of the travel lockdowns, campaign management had to be paused, but the partnership did not stop: this was when we helped introduce the Emarsys marketing automation system into the group.

Channels and tools

Summary

The niche-market focus, an account architecture managing a keyword set in the millions, and the wide channel mix together made it possible for a small local player to hold its own next to the global giants. The acquirer was a Polish company (Wirtualna Polska), which in itself proves that Noclegi.pl, as the Polish arm of Szallas Group, had genuinely grown stronger.