First course
Hotels work in Washington DC
Washington DC runs on visitors, and hotels sit at the centre of that. Demand splits across several kinds of buyer. There are leisure travellers booking around monuments, museums and the Smithsonian. There are government and association travellers tied to the convention calendar and the legislative session. There are corporate travellers on weekday business. There are families booking graduation and school trip weekends. Each of those buyers searches differently, and each one is worth a page. The competitive set is a mix of national brands with corporate marketing behind them and independent and owner operated hotels that handle their own marketing. Paid search in this market is expensive because the same keywords attract the brands, the OTAs and the independents at once. That makes organic and AI search visibility the ground where an independent hotel can hold its own, because a well written page about a specific neighbourhood, a specific trip type or a specific season can rank without a media budget behind it.
