Have you ever tried to search for a particular hotel on Google? Say you stayed there before and want to find it again. Or someone recommended it to you. The problem is that when you search for a hotel in Google, the hotel’s actual site is superseded in the search results by a ton of highly-optimized dodgy discount hotel vendors.
I was going to write in praise of the hotel I’m staying in in Dublin, the Alexander. I tried to search for it, but a scan through the first three pages of results didn’t turn up the hotel’s site. Obviously this isn’t a problem if you want to stay at a Holiday Inn, but I generally prefer independent hotels or small chains. I can’t really blame the hotels–you can’t expect every one of them to dedicate time and effort to beating out the results competition.
There are other categories of search terms that suffer a similar fate, but I can’t think of any at the moment.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Darren, if you take “google” out of your search terms and just leave the rest of the keywords, the Alexander hotel is #2 and #3 in results. Like a lot of hotels, it appears to be part of an international chain — in this case, O’Callaghan’s hotel chain. The hotel’s actual site is #1 in Yahoo and #2 in MSN. It doesn’t come up in Google right away, because they don’t appear to know how to optimize for Google (PageRank = 0!).
Most hotels appear on their corporate chain pages, which aren’t optimized for Google. It wouldn’t take a lot of thought to make the actual hotel or even the right hotel page show up in Google, but legit accommodations companies seem to have overlooked this.
I’ve found it works well if you do a 2-level search: hotel name + city.
In your case that’d be: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%22alexander+hotel%22+%22dublin%22
Again, I found it as the first result in this case. And it generally works whenever I know the name and city of a hotel. Drilling down is one of Google’s strongest points.
Al right, well, that was a lousy example.
Nah, it was easy to miss. They didn’t think to put the hotel name in the title tag.