Online Travel – Szallas.hu / Noclegi.pl
How did we help Noclegi.pl enter one of the most oversaturated markets – namely online travel, where new players must rival Booking.com, Trivago, Expedia and many more?
We have accompanied Noclegi.pl for 5 years from 2018 to 2023. In the beginning, they were still a loss-making company, also heavily hit by the COVID outbreak in 2020 that further hindered their plans on penetrating the Polish market.
With our joint efforts, the website turned to be profitable after the first years, and finally the company group got acquired on a very high valuation – 82 Mio EUR all in all.
Let’s see how we competed with Booking.com and other local players, and finally entered the Polish market successfully.
Problem Statement
Noclegi.pl is the Polish branch of Szallas Group that operates online accommodation aggregator sites mostly within the CEE region, however, also with global offerings in all-in-all 195 countries.
The company group faced a major challenge: up or out? As online tourism is among the most competitive and advanced industries, little local players cannot live long and resist against international players.
The Company Group back by the Hungarian operations decided to jump ahead and enter the Polish market (4x bigger and much more competitive).
Besides the general challenges of stepping into a completely new country, COVID massively hit the online travel industry and Noclegi.pl, too.
Domain: Noclegi.pl
Industry: online travel and accommodation
Employee: 350+
Partnership with Markestic: 2018 - 2023
Main competitors
Laszlo Benes
Head of Performance Marketing
Solution
We started the cooperation in 2018 and ended in 2023 due to a successful acquisition by a Polish media company, who centralised the marketing department ever since. At the time when our cooperation ended, Noclegi.pl even outperformed Szallas.hu, the main flagship product within the company group, based on the number of bookings.
Due to limited financial and human resources, when kickstarting the cooperation, instead of targeting each and every market segment, we decided to focus on specific, selected niches (certain geographical locations and accommodation types), turn those segments profitable and scale the operations from there.
Each and every settlement type (regions, cities, villages, etc.), accommodation type (hotel, hostels, etc.) had to be added to the ad accounts along with many geotargetings since bookings to Poland may have come not only from the domestic market (Poland) but anywhere else from the World. Noclegi.pl also offers accommodations to many other countries where Polish people are eager to travel to. Such a complexity resulted in millions of targeted keywords that had to be consolidated into a very systematic Google Ads account structure. On top of a clean structure, many automations and scripts must be implemented, too to keep such a large account in good shape.
Besides Google Ads, we utilised a much wider range of PPC channel mix – including: Hotel Price Ads, Facebook Ads, Criteo, RTB House, Trivago, Seznam and many more got tested, too (e.g: Optimise, Tradedoubler).
During COVID, when promotions and campaign management must be paused due to travel lockdowns, we did our best to support the Company Group on other marketing fields and we prepared the introduction of a new marketing automation tool – namely Emarsys.
In the course of the cooperation, we also fully managed the PPC ads of some related travel coupon sites – Szallasguru.hu and Pihipakk.hu.
Results
Along the 5+-year journey, key metrics were constantly improving:
- Domestic revenue in Poland grew 6.3 times
- Cost rate dropped by 108%point turning Noclegi.pl from a loss-making operation to a profit-generating one.
Why did the partnership end then?
- After the acquisition happened (Autumn, 2022), centralisation started and the PPC activities for Poland got reorganised to Warsaw in 2023.
All in all we consider the whole journey a great success since the buyer happened to be a Polish company (Wirtualna Polska), clearly showing the great results and growing potential of Noclegi.pl as the Polish branch of Szallas Group.
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