Sales & Marketing

The percentage is the wrong question. Strategy is the right one. Throwing 6% at marketing without a plan wastes 6%. Spending 2% with clear priorities and discipline beats it every time. Here's what matters more than the number: Where are travelers actually finding you today?

I’d encourage hoteliers to approach budgeting from a slightly different direction. Every reservation that comes from an OTA costs 15% to 18%… or more. And too many hotels receive too large a share of their revenues from OTAs. Consider a very conservative example.

Let's take a step back. Before diving into traditional budget allocation, given travelers' growing openness to adopting AI-enabled services (over 70%, according to Accenture's 2026 study), hotel properties should start considering Agentic AI as a primary customer acquisition channel.What does customer acquisition via Agentic AI look like?

Not true! The first rationale is that SEO now has significant overlap with AEO and GEO in terms of helping serve all the channels that will be important for AI travel search visibility. So, a focus on what drives SEO will inevitably aid in AI-driven hotel recommendations and, in the future, AI bookings.Next is the argument against SEO as a 'set it and forget it' exercise.

GEO builds on top of SEO, so SEO is not dead.I think that Search (Google) helps with Research and Planning, not necessarily Inspiration. I agree that Inspiration often lives in different areas, ie Social. I don't think people use OTAs for Inspiration, either.

I think that there may be some truth here, but I’d draw a different conclusion. First of all, maybe we have historically given SEO too much credit for branded organic traffic. If someone discovers a hotel through Instagram, Booking.com or a friend and then Googles the property name and books direct, SEO didn’t necessarily create that demand; it helped capture it.

Thank you, Simone, for raising a critical question about marketers’ essential role as AI reshapes the workplace. I see broader applications of this question across job functions beyond marketing.Specialization remains important in hotel marketing.

Are we over-specializing in hospitality digital marketing? The well-known idiomatic proverb “Jack of all trades, master of none" provides the answer to this question. Twenty years ago, a hospitality digital marketer could become a Jack of all trades.

LLMs are changing where value sits. In the past, deep knowledge of how to execute a specific task created an advantage. Today, I can use an LLM to understand the mechanics, explore options and complete work that once required a narrow specialist.This makes the big picture more important, not less.

The booking itself isn't the important part—it's the fact that it can be fully tracked from an AI conversation to a completed reservation.Right now, AI advertising generates very little volume, but every new channel starts small.Hotel metasearch followed a similar path before becoming a major source of direct bookings.AI could go even further because it helps travellers discover hotels, not just compare prices.Instead of searching, clicking and comparing multiple websites, people may eventually book through one conversation.If that happens, AI will become both a discovery tool and a booking channel.Hotels will need to make their prices, availability and hotel information easy for AI to understand.It's too early to draw conclusions from one booking, but it's an interesting sign of where hotel distribution could be heading.The real milestone isn't the ROAS—it's proving that an AI conversation can lead directly to a measurable booking.

The initial response—cool! How gratifying to witness this given all your years in this space. I was at Google last week hearing firsthand how digital advertising is evolving in this new search era.By comparison, Metasearch aggregated rates and redirected intent.

Booking.com just recently shared that only 1% of their revenue is presently generated via AI traffic. Doesn't seem like much, and at first glance this low figure seems to corroborate the view that AI is primarily a top- and mid-funnel channel.

No. The question bundles several things under "Google search marketing." Ads, Hotel Ads, Business Profile and YouTube sit alongside organic, and zero-click only erodes one slice of that, informational organic clicks.Booking intent is transactional and local, the query types least touched by AI Overviews: under 10% of commercial searches trigger one.

The zero-click phenomenon on Google is a fact. So, how can hoteliers benefit from it? What does it mean for hotel marketing? The answer is very simple: If there are no clicks, Google Hotel Ads and Google Ads become FREE BRAND MARKETING for the hotel since Google charges CPC only if someone clicks on your sponsored listings (Google Ads or Google Hotel Ads).The moral of the story?

Should hoteliers abandon Google search marketing because of zero-click search? All of the structural evidence suggests not. This is still the foundational architecture of online content as we enter the next generation of search—or AI Search, as I coin it.Whether consumers use an AI-powered browser layout or a native generative application, they are initially looking for frictionless information.

The hotel is the company actually providing the room. If the price and conditions are the same, the AI agent should book directly with the hotel instead of through a middleman like Booking.com. Direct booking can give guests: better prices loyalty points and perks easier changes and cancellations more accurate information better customer support.

Google has already announced: they will not be the merchant of record and they're not even charging a transaction fee. Needless to say, this is a great precedent but it doesn't mean other AI platforms will follow this example.At the same time, there's nothing that prevents us from pushing AI platforms in the direction of a direct booking path integration.

I am firmly of the view that Google will eventually present all offers openly. Complementing that will be the savvier user who explicitly directs their preferred booking channel. If I am a Bonvoy member, I want to book at marriott.com to protect my loyalty assets.Right now, it's a question of structured supply.

Helping independent hotels and small groups use tech to build a healthier P&L, my bias, wishful thinking and true belief is that AI travel search is a treasure trove of untapped profitability for unique properties doing incredible things.

We're at a crossroads and this can go in either direction.And the answer depends on whether we, as an industry, do something to push it in the right direction. That's one of the main reasons why AI Hospitality Alliance exists.

As to who will benefit from AI search, it depends entirely on what hotels are willing to do. And by AI search, I mean mostly agentic search, not chatbot search. For the first time in forever, AI search via OpenAI or Anthropic will give hotels the opportunity to exploit a structural advantage (leveraging customer knowledge) that OTAs won't be able to match.

The idea that “search is dead” is mostly an exaggeration. What is really happening is a change in how people find information online, not the disappearance of search itself. For hoteliers, this difference is important because people are still searching for hotels, but the way they search and where the traffic goes is starting to change.

Traditional search isn't dying — it's disaggregating. The front-end experience is shifting dramatically, but the underlying data infrastructure remains largely the same. When ChatGPT or Perplexity answers a hotel query, it's still drawing from indexed web content, reviews, and structured data that lives in the same ecosystem traditional SEO has always served.

The world is changing, and the rate of change is exponential. Here is an example: I entered my vacation requirements for next January into ChatGPT. In about 20 seconds, I received accommodation recommendations, with options, sorted in price within my price range.

This really resonated with me. People aren't leaving social media; they're moving where they think and decide. The public feed is noise; the real influence now happens inside private conversations. In hospitality, that's seismic: guests no longer "discover" hotels, they ask chatbots where to stay and trust the answer.

Chatbots are not replacing social media, but they are taking over the part that matters most. Social networks are still where people watch, scroll, and perform. Chatbots are where people think, decide, and ask questions they would not ask in public.

It will turn into "anti-social media marketing", where introverts go down the spiral of never-ending conversations with their AI bff, bombarded by paid ads to reinforce the downfall.

The real question is: will hotels need to franchise in 2030? Hotels today (early 2026) franchise because they have to, either because it gives surety to investors and banks at the development stage or because they are locked into a long-term contract with steep penalties.

The article raises a timely and necessary challenge to the traditional franchise value proposition. Distribution, technology, and digital visibility are no longer exclusive to brands, while fees, rigid standards, and limited data access continue to pressure owner returns.

Hotel brands have one key aspect: comfort for the investor. If you are a developer, attaching a brand to your new property may be a logical choice if you are seeking externally raised debt. Brands come with an operational code that eases hiring.

The idea of AI-crafted reviews doesn't worry me as much as the possibility of losing the emotional color that real guests bring to the table. Yes, quick prompts will make feedback easier and remove a lot of noise but hospitality has always lived in the small details that guests describe in their own words.

Can the future of hotel reviews be completely AI-generated? - Yes. Will it? Only if we think reviews will continue to be read by humans, which is highly unlikely, as already they're mostly digested by LLMs through semantic analysis to derive trends, sentiment, and suggested areas of improvement.

In the next 3–7 years, expect: 95% of reviews to be AI-generated from structured input, platforms to become "reputation orchestrators", users to see personalized, not universal, review summaries, hotels to optimize for models, not guests, because models shape guest choice.

This is a really thought-provoking take. I agree that metasearch isn't dead. it's evolving, quietly powering AI-driven interfaces rather than existing as a visible marketplace. The first to benefit will be those who can move fast and think at scale likely OTAs while traditional booking engines risk becoming just another costly layer.

Rather than disappearance, we're witnessing transfiguration: the logic of metasearch is alive, but its form is shifting from a visible comparison table to an invisible, integrated intelligence layer.

Simone's argument resonates strongly with me. If metasearch has dissolved into the invisible infrastructure of distribution, then the next challenge is redefining where real value lies. With conversational AI agents now capable of pre-filtering, recommending, and contextualizing travel options, simply consolidating data from various sources is no longer enough.

In the future, brands and OTAs will need to: Reduce their inventory and storytelling — so it's portable, embeddable, and instantly bookable anywhere. Invest in API-first distribution — enabling social, AI, and agent ecosystems to transact on their behalf.

That's an interesting question. However, I don't believe social media will become transactional when it comes to travel and hospitality. That doesn't mean it can't and won't become so for other industries - I can see this already happening for everyday purchases: apparel, jewelry, consumer goods, clothings, etc.

Good one! 💡 I definitely get a lot of product and service inspiration through my social media feeds. Entertainment is a big factor, but as someone tied into the hospitality sector, I particularly enjoy seeing industry offerings—whether that's cutting-edge technology or tangible experiences like hotels, resorts, and restaurants.

The end of the hyperlink economy may very well also mean the end of Google domination. Owning 92% of online searches worldwide, Google has long been in a quasi-monopoly situation, but this is shifting quickly, as people are catching on the ease of using LLM for search purposes: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Mistral, Deepseek...

The Fundamentals Stay the Same Discovery may shift from hyperlinks to AI answers, but advertising still rests on the basics: segmentation, targeting, positioning, and brand building. These don"t vanish when the funnel compresses — they adapt.

The investment won't be any less; maybe more. The search landscape, whatever its form, will inevitably migrate back to Google, a shift that the introduction of Gemini inside the browser will only accelerate. If the OTA model is truly sidelined, Google may look to take a significant portion of that revenue stream for itself.

It was inevitable that we would move to conversational AI and on-demand UI. The writing was on the wall years ago. Hotels will be caught off guard as OTA AI agents beat them without mercy at the pricing game. It’s time to build a defensive tool.

We will still need beautifully designed websites and flows — but more as validation layers and brand showcases than as discovery engines. OTAs and suppliers will increasingly serve as structured data ecosystems rather than pure UX-driven platforms.

Are we moving to a future - interesting... Though, you remove glossy images and brand (the websites of today), don't we just return to the flat green text screens of travel agents past, but this time operated by AI? Where description and detail was the important asset to capture interest and convert the booking?

The industry average of 5-10% of total revenue makes sense for budgeting purposes. What's more important is HOW you spend your budget. Comparing a hotel's marketing budget ratio to Expedia is apples to oranges; hotels are in the service sector whereas OTAs are tech businesses.

According to HotelMarketingWorks.com, most hotels allocate between 4-8% of their total revenue for marketing activities. New hotels: 10% of projected revenue Established properties: 4-6% of actual revenue Luxury hotels: Up to 8% of revenue Seasonal adjustments are also recommended as follows: High Season: Increase budget by 20-30% Shoulder Season: Maintain regular budget Low Season: Reduce budget by 20-30% or redirect to advance bookings

The question of what percentage of total revenue should hoteliers be spending on marketing should not be answered by comparing with OTA, but rather by looking at product lifecycle and corporate goals. By product lifecycle, we mean where the hotel is standing in terms of lifetime existence: launching stage, early growth, maturity, descaling or declining?

This is ongoing learning, as LLMs continue to learn. But GEO is built on top of SEO. It has to get its knowledge from somewhere. It means UCG (ie reviews) is more important, specific content is more important and understanding your target market is more important.

I work with many hoteliers and when it comes to the topic of online discovery, the first question I ask is: have you tried to search for your property, or lodging in your area, on different AI tools lately? It's quite surprising how so few have done it.

The speed of change is extraordinary! This rapid shift to AI summaries and conversational search marks a critical turning point for hotel content. Simple keyword-stuffing is ending; AI thrives on deep context and relationships, not raw data.