WHAT WE HAVE SEEN THIS YEAR:
The hotels spending most on marketing are often the ones filling the fewest rooms.
A brief comes in various forms but it usually says the same thing: there’s a content calendar running, a paid social budget, seasonal email campaigns and a website that looks the part. They’re doing everything a hospitality marketing agency is supposed to recommend. And it still isn’t working.
The problem, isn’t the channel. It’s the absence of any real strategy behind it.
A social post, email newsletter or Google Ad are all a delivery mechanism. The channels have never been cheaper or more accessible, and every business is using them. When these tools are available to everyone, simply using the tool it is no longer the thing that sets results apart. What actually makes the difference is the decision that comes before the post, the email or the ad: the right message, to the right person, at the right moment, at a price that makes commercial sense for your business.
That last part is where most hotel marketing falls apart.
We worked with a coastal hotel last spring that was running a well-executed Easter campaign. Rooms were selling. The social content was getting strong reach. Email open rates looked healthy. The marketing was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
When we sat down with the numbers, we found they’d filled almost every room at a rate set eighteen months earlier and never revised. They were full on the highest-demand weekend of the quarter at a price their competitors had moved well beyond. The marketing worked. The commercial strategy didn’t.
Revenue management is where proper strategy starts
The piece hotels consistently undervalue is revenue management, not just in the pricing sense, but as the commercial foundation everything else is built on. A live, data-led view of what each room is worth on each night, tracked against what the market is doing around you, is the thing that makes a marketing strategy coherent rather than directional.
Without it, you can fill the hotel for the wrong weekend, at the wrong rate, chasing the wrong guest. The paid media spend looks effective until you check the margin. The SEO traffic looks healthy until you notice it’s pulling guests in on the softest midweek rates. The email campaigns go out without any sense of what the revenue picture looks like across the next twelve weeks.
Proper hotel marketing strategy starts with the data underneath it. What are your soft dates and are you doing enough to fill them early? Where are your peak periods and are you priced correctly for them? Which guest segments book furthest ahead and what does their messaging need to say at that stage of the decision journey? None of those questions can be answered without clean, live revenue intelligence.
We work alongside Otterly Booked, an outsourced revenue management service built specifically for independent UK hotels. Their system watches the market every day, competitor rates, local events, booking pace and forward pricing projections across the year ahead. A revenue manager reviews every recommended price before it goes live and applies it directly in the booking system. The result isn’t just better room rates. It’s a real-time commercial picture that a marketing strategy can actually be built on: you know exactly where to apply pressure, which nights need early marketing effort and which ones can hold on rate without it.
That’s the information a properly run hotel marketing programme needs at its centre. Without it, every decision is a guess dressed as a strategy.
The hard part was never doing it. It’s doing it right.
Delivery mechanisms have never been more accessible. Anyone can set up a Meta ad campaign or send an email newsletter. That was never the hard part and it never will be. The hard part is knowing what the message should say, who it should reach, on which night, at what price point and at exactly the right moment in the guest’s decision journey.
That’s what strategy does. And building that strategy requires the commercial data to underpin it.
The hotels that bring those two things together are the ones that stop spending more to get less. If you want to talk through what that looks like for your property, get in touch with the team.
