Hotel and resort groups operate some of the most analytically complex digital ecosystems in the consumer space. A visitor's journey spans a marketing site, a third-party booking engine, post-booking confirmation emails, loyalty program portals, and often multiple properties with their own pages and promotional calendars. Getting a coherent view of that journey requires more than a standard GA4 installation.
This Hawaiian hotel and resort chain came to us at the start of a full website redesign. The existing analytics environment was built on Adobe Analytics and had accumulated years of custom configurations that were poorly documented and partially broken. The redesign was the right moment to move to GA4 and build something cleaner, but it had to be done without losing the measurement continuity that their marketing team depended on.
The Challenge in Full
The core measurement problem had several dimensions. First, the booking flow lived on a Sabre Synxis reservation system hosted on a separate domain. Visitors moving from the marketing site to the booking engine crossed a domain boundary, which breaks standard session attribution and makes it appear as though the booking engine is generating its own traffic rather than receiving it from the main site.
Second, the property's promotional strategy was sophisticated. Different properties ran different offers at different times, and the marketing team needed to understand not just which promotions drove bookings, but which room categories and rate plans visitors engaged with before converting. This required instrumentation that went well beyond standard eCommerce tracking.
Third, the group was adding OneTrust for cookie consent management ahead of a planned expansion into markets with stricter privacy regulations. The OneTrust implementation needed to be integrated with GA4 and all advertising tags through Google's Consent Mode framework, and it needed to work correctly across both the main domain and the Sabre booking domain.
The Architecture We Designed
Cross-Domain Tracking
Cross-domain tracking in GA4 requires configuration in the GA4 property settings and the correct implementation of linker parameters that carry session information from one domain to the next. We configured the GA4 property to recognize both the main hotel domain and the Sabre booking domain as part of the same measurement context, and tested the linker configuration extensively to confirm that sessions crossing the domain boundary were correctly attributed.
We also implemented a custom parameter that captured the referring property page whenever a visitor entered the booking flow, so the marketing team could see which specific property or promotion page drove each reservation attempt, not just which traffic source brought the visitor to the site.
100+ Custom Parameters
The parameter specification for this engagement was one of the most detailed we have produced. Every meaningful visitor interaction was mapped to an event with a set of parameters that captured the full context of that interaction.
For property browsing, events captured the property name, property location, room category, rate plan, and whether any promotional rate was displayed. For the booking flow, events captured check-in and check-out date ranges, number of guests, room selected, rate plan chosen, add-ons considered, and booking value at each stage. For promotional content, events captured the promotion name, position on the page, and whether the visitor clicked through to the relevant property or booking page.
The result was over 100 distinct custom parameters defined and deployed across the two domains, each registered as a custom dimension in GA4 so they could be used in reports and audience definitions.
OneTrust and Consent Mode v2
The OneTrust implementation needed to operate across both domains, which required configuring a shared consent domain so that a visitor's consent choice on the main site carried over to the booking engine without presenting the banner again. We configured OneTrust's cross-domain consent syncing and tested it across a range of scenarios to confirm that consent was being respected correctly on both sides of the domain boundary.
Consent Mode v2 was configured through GTM, mapping OneTrust's consent categories to GA4's four consent types: analytics_storage, ad_storage, ad_user_data, and ad_personalization. Default consent states were set to denied for all four types, with granted states updating on visitor acceptance. The advertising tags for Google Ads and Meta were also configured to respect these consent signals.
Managing the Adobe Analytics Migration
Running a measurement migration alongside a website redesign adds risk. The site changes, the analytics platform changes, and the underlying data changes all at once, which makes it very difficult to distinguish between a tracking issue and a genuine shift in visitor behavior.
We managed this by running GA4 in parallel with Adobe Analytics for eight weeks before the Adobe contract lapsed, giving the marketing team time to validate that the GA4 data matched their historical patterns and to build confidence in the new reporting environment before the old one went away. We documented the key metrics and their GA4 equivalents so the team could make the transition without losing their analytical reference points.
Several metrics did not have direct equivalents between the two platforms. In those cases, we documented the conceptual differences and helped the team understand what the GA4 version of the metric was actually measuring, rather than simply mapping old names to new ones and leaving gaps in understanding.
Reporting Outcomes
The primary reporting output was a Looker Studio environment with separate views for the executive team, the property marketing managers, and the digital marketing team. Each view surfaced different cuts of the same underlying data.
The executive view focused on booking conversion rates, revenue attribution by channel, and property-level performance trends. The property marketing view showed engagement with property-specific content, promotional effectiveness, and room category interest patterns. The digital marketing view showed campaign performance, audience overlap analysis, and funnel progression from first visit through booking completion.
The cross-domain visibility the implementation provided changed how the marketing team understood their funnel. They discovered that a significant portion of visitors who began the booking flow on desktop completed it on mobile on a return visit, a pattern that was invisible in the previous implementation and that changed how they thought about their remarketing strategy.
Key takeaway: Cross-domain tracking is not a technical detail. For any hospitality brand using a third-party booking engine, it is the difference between seeing your full conversion funnel and seeing only a fraction of it. Getting it right changes the decisions you make about where to invest in the guest acquisition journey.
Technologies Used
- Google Analytics 4 with Enhanced eCommerce and cross-domain tracking
- Google Tag Manager across two domains
- OneTrust with Consent Mode v2 integration
- Sabre Synxis booking engine dataLayer integration
- Looker Studio with multi-audience reporting environment
- Google Ads and Meta with consent-aware conversion tracking
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