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.