Hotel Pedra Niedda
After the ad campaigns went live, inquiries increased so much that one person alone could no longer keep up.
Budoni, Italy
60
Background
Pedra Niedda is a 60-unit hotel in Budoni, surrounded by nature and just a short walk from the beaches on Sardinia’s eastern coast.
Founded in 1974, the hotel has evolved over the years, adapting its offer as guest expectations changed.
In the past, Pedra Niedda mainly focused on traditional full-board and half-board stays for families. Later, the hotel moved to a B&B model, expanded its rooms, and added a restaurant, bar and pizzeria open to both hotel guests and external customers.
This helped Pedra Niedda reach new audiences. Today, the hotel welcomes not only families, but also couples and groups of different ages.
What has stayed the same is the family-run atmosphere. It remains one of the hotel’s strongest assets and has helped build a loyal guest base over time.
“Guests feel that family atmosphere. We are always available, even for needs that go beyond the room itself. That creates a connection, and it brings them back year after year. We are proud of that.”
The challenge
The family-run approach is one of Pedra Niedda’s strengths: guests receive personal attention and often return. At the same time, day-to-day work left little room to focus on growing the business more strategically.
“The company is made up of five people. Everyone has their role, but when something needs to be done, we all do a bit of everything. A lot of the work was still manual, and every task took time.
That is why most bookings came through agreements with agencies or through platforms like Booking.com and Expedia. We had a website, but it was mostly there for looks.”
When Pedra Niedda started working with Smartness, the goal was to simplify recurring tasks and strengthen the hotel’s online presence and profitability.
The aim was to grow direct bookings and reduce reliance on OTAs, which had come to represent 61% of sales.
To achieve this, Smartness worked with the team on a dedicated marketing strategy designed to:
- strengthen online visibility
- redirect searches from OTAs to the official website
- increase the average booking value
- support overall revenue growth
The solution
After Pedra Niedda simplified many manual processes with Smartpms, the all-in-one software from Smartness, and Smartcrs, the Central Reservation System, the hotel entrusted Smartsite with a complete website redesign, including the Booking Engine. Pedra Niedda also activated Smartads Base to manage advertising campaigns.
At this stage, the purpose of advertising was to reach guests who were already close to booking. To do this, the Smartness team focused on two campaign types:
- Google Ads Brand Name campaign, to cover searches from people who already knew Pedra Niedda or were looking for the hotel directly. This helped the hotel protect existing demand and guide it toward the official website.
- Google Ads Destination campaigns, to reach people searching for accommodation in the area and increase the hotel’s visibility for location-based searches.
“A relationship of trust was built. When Smartness recommends something, we know it is not just about selling us another service, but because they believe it is truly needed. Every solution they suggested turned out to be right for us: even with the property management software alone, we saw a good increase in sales.
So when they proposed advertising campaigns, we said yes. And it was the right decision, because after the campaigns went live, inquiries increased so much that one person alone could no longer keep up.”
The results
In two years with Smartads, Pedra Niedda achieved clear growth, both in revenue and in the balance of its sales channels.
The advertising campaigns strengthened the direct channel, increased the average booking value and reduced the relative weight of OTAs.
Revenue and ADR: more growth, more value
Over the period analysed, total revenue increased by +16%. At the same time, the overall average ADR grew by +25%.
The ADR increase was visible across all main channels: offline direct bookings, the Booking Engine and OTAs.
This shows that growth did not come from more aggressive pricing, but from Pedra Niedda’s ability to capture more value from existing demand across the full channel mix.
Direct channel and OTAs: a healthier balance
The strongest result was in the direct channel.
Total direct revenue grew by +71%. The Booking Engine saw particularly strong growth, with an increase of +82%. Offline direct revenue also grew by +63%.
OTAs continued to generate revenue, but their share of the channel mix fell by more than 8 percentage points. In two years, OTA share decreased from 61% to 52%. Over the same period, the direct channel increased from 39% to 48%.
This allowed Pedra Niedda to keep the visibility provided by the portals while shifting more business toward channels that are easier to control and more strategic for profitability.
Advertising: efficient acquisition and qualified demand
The Google Ads campaigns generated an overall ROAS of around 29.8x, with a conversion cost of approximately 3.36%.
In practical terms, for every €100 in tracked bookings generated by the campaigns, Pedra Niedda invested around €3.36 in media spend.
“We did not only increase sales. We also improved communication with guests throughout the entire journey, from booking to stay. This helped us increase both the number and the quality of our reviews, which had been low before. In short, Smartness has become more of a partner than a provider for us.”
Albero Capovolto
Before, I used to spend the whole day in front of the computer. Now my operational workload has not just been cut in half: it is one tenth of what it used to be.
La Favorita
When the results-based model was proposed to us, accepting it felt natural: sharing goals in a win-win logic was the decisive factor for us.