excellent advertising practice

I have been quick to criticise poor advertising, including poor landing pages. However, TravelRepublic.co.uk excelled itself when I was looking for a hotel in Athens. Regular readers will know I have been a frequent visitor to the Greek capital, and so I knew of two hotels in which I would like to stay - so I searched on their names on Google. The first was the Residence Georgio*.

One of the AdWords ads listed was with TravelRepublic and I clicked on the link, which took me to 'their' Georgio page that included a calendar for me to select my required dates**. Here's the resulting page
After checking the price I returned to Google and searched for the Park Hotel. Again, TravelRepublic had an ad, so I clicked on it ...
And here's the good - no, make that great - bit: the TravelRepublic landing page for the Park Hotel already had my travel dates pre-selected. Excellent.
If you're wondering, its all magic - probably - done with IP address recognition. This should be standard practice for advertisers.

* footnote #1 - this hotel actually changed its name last year [to the Melia] and whilst there is a website on this name, the hotel seems to have retained its own brand online. A lesson on the problems of changing a brand/organization's name when it has an established online presence.

** footnote #2 - for any burglars reading: I have changed my actual travel dates on the examples shown