It is brand building, long term. That might be all it is. It doesn’t cost anything to have a page, and people will stumble across it if you optimize the page properly. BUT….  I ran some advertising tests that retrieved some fairly meager and interesting results.
I don’t think this would be a time to reinvent the wheel and start buying into a moderne approach to advertising with all this 2.0 stuff. There are some others where advertising might be wise, but we will wait and see results from these other sights as well (I am running some tests with a business I am involved with, and will see if the page hits transform into site hits into bookings).
Google Adwords are probably still a strong idea… and just having a solid, optimized website.
But when you *really* start looking at these sites: Facebook, Yelp, etc…. what is the business model?
Because Facebook has some issues now.
It will be interesting to see what happens. A lot of people have been banking on FB… but it always has been just a part of the overall program in hotel’s cases, anyway.