How Hotel Casa Coronel became #1 on Booking.com in La Paz
It wasn't a campaign or an algorithm trick. It was daily operation: counting the cash, measuring every channel, and answering for every night. Here's what we did.
Hotel Casa Coronel has 15 rooms in downtown La Paz. Today it is the #1 hotel on Booking.com in the city. I get asked often how that happens, and the answer disappoints anyone hoping for a trick: it happens by operating.
What we did NOT do
We didn’t buy reviews. We didn’t drop the rate to fill rooms. We didn’t hire an agency to “optimize the listing”. All of that exists, and all of it shows — the guest who arrived because of a retouched photo and finds something else will charge you for it in the next review.
What we did do
Count the money every day. Every front-desk shift closes with a daily cut: how many nights sold, through which channel, at what rate. It’s not bureaucracy — it’s the only way to know whether today’s rate was right, and to find out within 24 hours (not at month-end) when something drifts.
Measure every channel separately
Booking, the hotel’s own site, the phone, the returning guest: each channel has its cost and its kind of guest. Once you know what each one leaves you, you stop fighting commissions and start using them: Booking is the shop window where the new guest finds you; the job is making the second stay a direct one.
The review is earned in the hallway
The score that sustains a #1 isn’t managed in the Booking dashboard: it’s earned when the room is ready on arrival, when the shower fault is reported and fixed the same day, and when the front desk has the authority to solve things without escalating everything. Our team logs every incident in the system on the spot — and the review takes care of itself.
The right rate is the market’s, not fear’s
A small hotel panics about the empty room, and that panic costs more than the lost night: the wrong guest, a bad review, a burned rate. We measure occupancy and price together, against what the La Paz market actually pays, and we hold the rate. The #1 is also that: a guest who paid a fair price for what they got — and says so.
I write this from our own operation: we run Casa Coronel ourselves, with our team and our system. If you own a hotel and want this structure underneath it, let’s talk.
Eduardo Amézquita
Founder & CEO of Trip and Homes
I write from the operation: everything here is lived in our own properties. Read our story →