How I helped Palace Resorts achieve 4.2× ROAS with Google Ads

A 14-month Google Ads campaign that transformed direct booking performance for a luxury resort chain — reducing reliance on OTAs and cutting cost-per-booking by 38%.

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Sam Barreto · samktg.com 14 months €180,000 ad spend managed

Return on ad spend

1 ×

Cost per booking

- 0 %

Direct booking revenue

+ %

Total ad spend managed

€ 1 k

The challenge

Palace Resorts, a luxury resort chain operating across Mexico and the Caribbean, was heavily dependent on OTA platforms like Booking.com and Expedia for their direct bookings. This dependency was eroding margins — OTAs were taking 15–20% commission on every booking.

Their existing Google Ads account had been running for two years but was poorly structured, with broad match keywords bleeding budget and no conversion tracking in place. They were spending €12k/month with no clear picture of what was working.

No conversion tracking

There was no way to measure actual bookings from paid traffic — only clicks and impressions.

Broad match keyword waste

Over 60% of budget was going to irrelevant search terms with zero purchase intent.

No audience segmentation

All campaigns targeting the same generic audience with no differentiation between luxury and budget travellers.

The strategy

My approach was to completely rebuild the account from scratch rather than try to fix the existing structure. The first two weeks were purely diagnostic — setting up proper conversion tracking through Google Tag Manager and mapping the booking funnel end to end.

From there, I built a three-tier campaign structure targeting users at different stages of the purchase journey:

Top of funnel: Display and YouTube campaigns targeting high-income travellers in key source markets (US, Canada, UK, Germany)
Mid funnel: Search campaigns targeting destination + luxury intent keywords (“all inclusive resorts Mexico”, “luxury Cancun resort”)
Bottom of funnel: Branded search and remarketing to convert users who had visited but not booked

Implementation timeline

Month 1–2

Audit, tracking setup & account rebuild

Full account audit, GTM conversion tracking implementation, new campaign structure, keyword research and negative keyword list.

Month 3–4

Launch & data collection

Campaigns live. Conservative bidding strategy to gather data. Weekly optimisation of search terms, bids and ad copy.

Month 5–8

Optimise & scale

Smart bidding strategies introduced. Budget increased on top-performing campaigns by 40%.

Month 9–14

Scale & diversify

YouTube awareness campaigns added. Hotel-specific ad customisers deployed. Seasonal bid adjustments for peak booking periods.

Results in detail

Before (Month 1)

ROAS

1.1×

Before (Month 1)

1.1×

€320

Before (Month 1)

ROAS

1.1×

Before (Month 1)

1.1×

€320

Results in detail

"Sam is instrumental in our digital advertising strategy. Within six months he transformed a money-losing Google Ads account into our most profitable direct booking channel."

Campaign overview

Client

Palace Resorts

Industry

Luxury hospitality

Platform

Google Ads

Duration

14 months

ROAS achieved

4.2×

Ad spend

€180,000

Key results

ROAS improvement

+282%

Direct bookings

+218%

Cost per booking

-38%

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