Hotel and restaurant marketing agency: the agency for independent hotels and restaurants

Restaurant marketing is a very particular field. Unlike other sectors, it relies heavily on emotion, visuals, geolocation, recommendation and immediacy.

To make the right choice, you need a partner who understands the intense rhythm of your trade and the codes of the culinary world. Here are the five essential criteria for choosing the right agency for your restaurant.

1. Look for genuine restaurant expertise

A restaurant's marketing is not managed like that of a construction firm. The agency must have restaurant references. It must know the weight of platforms such as TheFork or TripAdvisor, the role of restaurant POS systems in your daily routine, your margin constraints, and know how to showcase your concept and your customer experience.

2. Assess their command of local SEO

This is the lifeblood of a restaurant. When a customer searches for “restaurant Biarritz” or “best brunch in Saint-Jean-de-Luz”, you must appear in the top organic results and in the local pack. Does the agency know how to optimise a Google Business Profile listing to perfection? How does it handle keywords linked to your speciality, whether bistronomy, tapas or vegetarian? That is the whole point of our local SEO work for restaurants.

3. Check their command of your technical ecosystem

The restaurant customer journey has changed a great deal. The agency must master the tools you use every day: POS software such as Lightspeed, ordering and click and collect such as Obypay. For booking, can it integrate and optimise Zenchef, TheFork, or the “Book” button directly in Google?

4. Check how they manage online reputation

Online reviews make and break an establishment's reputation. A good agency should be able to propose a strategy to encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews, and know how to respond professionally, and without emotion, to negative criticism.

5. Make sure they understand the soul of your concept

A hushed fine dining restaurant does not communicate with the same tone or colours as a lively brasserie or a street-food concept. At your first meeting, the agency should ask you about your identity, your chef, your local producers and the experience you want your customers to have.

ARETA meets all five criteria. Book a discovery meeting to share your ambitions.

Hotel marketing faces very different challenges from restaurant marketing. While a restaurant relies on impulse and a local clientele, a hotel speaks to travellers who plan, compare, and often come from far away.

A hotel's main challenge is almost always the same: reducing its dependence on OTAs, the platforms such as Booking.com or Expedia that eat into margins with their commissions.

To choose the right agency for your hotel, particularly in a tourist area such as Béarn and the Basque Country, here are the five criteria to check.

1. An obsession with direct booking

This is the lifeblood. The agency must do more than promise visibility: it must have proven strategies to get customers to book on your website rather than on Booking. This is the foundation of our approach to hotel SEO.

2. Command of the hotel technical ecosystem

A good agency should speak the same language as your receptionist and understand how your tools fit together. Does it know booking engines, channel managers and PMSs? Can it optimise the journey on your website so that the booking module is smooth, fast and reassuring, especially on mobile?

3. Destination marketing, not just the room

A customer does not book a bed, they book a stay in Biarritz, in the Pyrenees or in the Basque Country. Does the agency know how to showcase your hotel's surroundings: hiking, experiences, local food, proximity to Spain?

4. A multilingual, long-tail SEO strategy

Unlike restaurant SEO, your catchment area is national, even international. Can the agency position you for very specific searches, such as “charming hotel with Pyrenees mountain view” or “boutique hotel near ski resort Béarn”? Does it offer to optimise your website in English or Spanish to capture cross-border customers?

5. Online reputation management at scale

For a hotel, reviews are scrutinised by future travellers. The agency must support you on TripAdvisor, on Google, but also on the booking platforms themselves. Does it have systems, such as sending emails after the stay, to collect positive reviews on a regular basis?

One practical tip: during your interviews, ask agencies for a live mini-audit of your current website. If they browse it and immediately point out two or three obstacles to booking, a badly placed button, photos that are too heavy, a lack of reassurance, that is a good sign.

ARETA meets all five criteria. Book a discovery meeting to share your ambitions.

Not by leaving the OTAs overnight. They remain a shop window that brings you visibility and customers you would not otherwise have reached. The goal is to shift a share of these bookings to your website, stay after stay.

Three levers, in this order. A website that makes people want to book direct, with a booking engine that reads well on mobile and a clear benefit reserved for direct bookings. A Google listing and hotel SEO that make you visible for your brand name and your destination searches, so that the traveller who spotted you on Booking finds you directly. And customer relations maintained after departure, email and contact database, so that the second stay no longer goes through a commission.

Almost always, but not for free. An OTA booking costs you a commission taken on every night, indefinitely. A direct booking costs you an initial investment, website, content, visibility, then a very low marginal cost on subsequent stays.

The calculation is done on your own volume, not on an industry average. We set it out at scoping, with your actual commission rate and your current share of direct bookings. The most profitable lever is, incidentally, not acquisition but return: a customer who comes back without going through a platform changes the equation, which means building loyalty with your customers after their stay rather than forgetting them at check-out.

The local pack, those three businesses shown with the map, depends on three families of signals: the relevance of your listing, the distance from the person searching, and your prominence.

You cannot act on distance. You act on the rest: a complete, up-to-date Google listing, the right primary category, exact opening hours, recent photos, menu filled in, questions and answers kept active. Then a steady flow of reviews, with replies. Then a website consistent with the listing, same contact details, same hours, same names. This is the work covered by our restaurant SEO.

Reply, quickly, and without justifying yourself. A negative review with no reply costs more than the review itself: it leaves the next reader with the complainant's version only. A short, factual and polite reply does the opposite: it shows how you handle a problem.

Do not ask for the removal of a review that breaks no rule; it does not succeed. Never ask for a review in exchange for anything, it goes against Google's guidelines and puts your listing at risk. The right approach is to ask all your customers systematically, not only the satisfied ones, and to pass recurring irritants back to the kitchen or reception. We set up this process as part of managing your online reputation.

Yes, for a simple reason: the listing and the social account do not belong to you. Their rules change, their reach varies, and an account can be suspended without notice. The website is the only asset you control.

It plays three roles that platforms do not fill: it takes bookings or orders directly, without commission. It carries the content that makes you visible on longer searches, those a listing does not capture. And it serves as the reference source, for Google and for answer engines alike. Without it, your organic SEO is capped at whatever the listing is willing to give you.

We do not replace your integrator, we plug into what already exists. On the restaurant side, we regularly work with restaurant POS software, Lightspeed first and foremost, as well as online ordering and click and collect solutions. On the hotel side, with booking engines, channel managers and PMSs.

What we look at first is not the brand of the tool but what it gives back to you: do you know what a customer brings in, where they come from and whether they return? If the tool does not say, no campaign will say it in its place. For restaurants, our guide to restaurant POS systems in Pau and Béarn details the selection criteria.

By reversing the calendar. What is at stake in July is prepared in February: content, visuals, partnerships and visibility take weeks to take effect. Looking for customers when you are empty is arriving too late.

In peak season, the effort goes into capture: reviews, contact database, offers for quiet periods made to guests who are present. In quiet periods, into production and into segments that do not follow the tourist calendar: seminars, groups, local customers, themed weekends. This long-term steering is what we provide as outsourced marketing director for properties without an in-house marketing team.

Yes, it is a natural extension of our work on the restaurant table. The challenges are similar: a visitor experience to tell, passing visitors to turn into loyal customers, and direct sales to develop against distribution.

We support wine estates on local visibility, online sales and customer relations. The detail is on our wine estate marketing page, and the link with restaurants on our approach to culinary marketing.

Yes, and it is becoming a subject in its own right. A growing share of travellers and customers put their question to an assistant rather than a search engine, and the assistant cites only a few sources.

Getting cited takes work: pages that answer real questions, verifiable information that is consistent across your website, your Google listing and sector directories, and markup that machines can read. This applies to every spelling used in the sector: hospitality, CHR, hotellerie or hôtellerie, hotelier or hôtelier. We measure this visibility in AI answers with regular checks, rather than by feel.

Our main office is in Bayonne, 2 place du Château Vieux. We work throughout the Basque Country, Béarn and Bigorre, from Biarritz to Pau, from Oloron-Sainte-Marie to Tarbes and its SEO, and we also work remotely for more distant properties.

On budget, our rates are public and start at €120 excl. VAT per hour depending on the service. A forty-room hotel that wants to take back control of its bookings and a restaurant that wants to be visible in its town need neither the same work nor the same pace. The thirty-minute scoping call is free and without obligation, and the quote that follows is fixed and itemised line by line. Before choosing the levers, our marketing consultant in the Basque Country sets the season and the priorities.