ETG Marketing Hub expands to hundreds of advertising channels including social, CTV, DOOH and audio, using ETG's first-party travel data to help hotels, airlines and tourism boards reach targeted audiences.
PATA and Azerbaijan Tourism Board signed an MOU in Baku to grow Azerbaijan's presence in Asia Pacific markets, covering trade engagement, media outreach, and source market development.
Hotel websites are not becoming unimportant, but they have shifted from being a competitive differentiator to essential digital infrastructure.A beautiful website will rarely win a guest if the price parity is poor, the online reputation is mediocre, or the property is invisible on AI discovery platforms.
If argue that websites are more important than ever because that's how assistants like Muse, Dit, Grok Bot and Instinct find and book hotels (not via API or MCP). We're just optimizing for bots now, not humans.
HotelPartner rebrands to HotelPartner Revenue Profit Management and launches a new service-light platform tier in Europe for consultants and smaller hotel groups.
Miraggio Thermal Spa Resort generated over €515K in email marketing ROI within its first four months using Revinate Core and Marketing.
Cheval Collection launches a refreshed brand identity and new booking platform, including a corporate portal and a first-of-its-kind tiered member discount structure within the GHA DISCOVERY loyalty alliance.
A Barcelona study of 27,360 AI travel answers found independents are 8x more likely than chains to be invisible to AI, with hotel websites supplying only 7% of what AI says about properties.
Iceland's largest hotel group consolidates direct booking and GDS connectivity across 18 properties onto Aven's SynXis-based platform, adding Booking Engine, Corporate/Agent Tool, and GDS Distribution.
Sojern's second annual European Destinations Advisory Board met in Athens, uniting DMO leaders from across Europe to discuss AI, the Adara integration, and measuring marketing economic impact.
Ruby Hotels launches Dive In with Ruby, a live music series across UK and Germany pairing established artists with secret sets from emerging talent to position its properties as cultural destinations.
Holiday Inn Germany launches its "Chief Holiday Officer" initiative this autumn, giving children staying at its hotels a badge and wish list to help shape the family holiday experience.
Influence Society's seventh SOCIETIES report argues that AI is reshaping hotel discovery and content production, making strong, distinctive brand identity more critical than ever for visibility and guest choice.
HOSPA appoints Ryan Haynes as Head of Industry Engagement to lead programme development for the National Hotel Marketing Conference 2027, scheduled for 27 May at Hilton at St George's Park.
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?
The inaugural HoSS, held in London on 3-4 September, brought 200+ hospitality marketing leaders from 14 countries to address the gap between social media's commercial expectations and current strategy and capability.
With 94% of hotels failing to appear in AI search results, venues must adopt structured, detail-rich content strategies to stay discoverable to event planners using tools like ChatGPT and Claude.
Leonardo Hotels survey of 2,000 UK adults finds 63% argue during holiday planning, with sleep disruption and budget disputes among top stressors affecting couples on city breaks.
Influence Society hosts a free, invite-only half-day event for Swiss hoteliers in the Geneva area, focusing on AI, data, and digital marketing's impact on hotel visibility and guest relationships.
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.