Sales & Marketing

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.

Why are we always trying to oppose one against the other in terms of online search? Organic search and paid search should be seen as a single, unified digital marketing strategy. They complement and amplify each other. Why? they have a shared goal: visibility, traffic, credibility and conversion amplified by AI personalisation, the data analysis synergy: it allows to focus only on the 'converting' terms and inform the SEO content actions.

The answer is rather straightforward: if somebody is bidding on your brand terms (OTAs and affiliates, for example), you are leaving clicks and bookings on the table if you do not: that additional spot in the SERP affects your conversion rates significantly.

Who searches your hotel by its official name? These are your past guests, people referred by friends and family, people influenced by word-of-mouth, people who have read positive reviews on social media or PR about the property.

Traditional SEO is not dead, but traditional search is! Consumers simply do not search as they did 10 or 15 years ago. Social search is now a big component of the customer journey: from TikTok to YouTube to Instagram, the platforms are diverse and usage greatly vary depending on age and traveler habits.

In spite of all the buzz around genAI, the AI Search market share today is estimated around 6% of the total search market, and estimated to go up to 14% by 2028 (Search Engine Land). Google's own Gemini AI has already been made available to Google's 84 billion monthly users - compare this to ChatGPT's 121 million users!

I don't believe that SEO is dead. I am of the view that the role of SEO is going to develop in alignment with the evolution of search. After all, it doesn't resemble the way it began with the incumbent approach. The challenge remains how to be found.

We can hope regulators will someday "reimagine" policies to enable innovation, but let's face it: this is entirely beyond the industry's control. Expecting governments to grasp the complexities of hotel tech is like waiting for a no-show guest to miraculously fill your occupancy gap.

Technical fragmentation has long been a challenge in all aspects of hospitality. Some of this is a reality. Some of it is by choice and driven from vendor marketing propoganda about 'Best of Breed'. The reality is that to overcome this general challenge in industry, consolidation and unification is required.

Website analytics in isolation from the rest of the hotel tech stack has lost its importance. Combined with the property's CRM, RMS, a personalization engine and the rest of the tech stack, it is priceless and impacts many revenue-generation functions: Revenue Management: The website browsing behavior, booking engine denials, time spent on web pages of various packages, offers and hotel amenities are important data signals for the RMS and property pricing strategies.

ChatGPT Search is definitely a threat to Google as people will look to keep it "all in one app" by melding search functionality with ChatGPT's core content generation functionality. That said, what's more pertinent to hotels is, How will these AI search tools impact travel?" In answering this, just think back to your own last work trip or vacation.

The threat by the genAI search engines has to be taken seriously and this is exactly what Google is doing. First, Gemini AI and its latest version Gemini 1.5-pro-002 is comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4o and better in more complex tasks like coding and problem-solving.

It's an interesting situation. Those who've always had the information and also the commerce. Versus those that have started with the information retasked to be more informative. But not yet the commerce. My view is that the more informative information coupled with commerce will prove out in the end.

Search based ads are going to change, a lot. They're great for bottom of the funnel marketing. The low hanging fruit. But they're not great for discovery. However with AI there's a possible mix of intent and discovery which could be the most powerful of both world.

These are interesting times, indeed, when it comes to search. Specially when it comes to itineraries and travel recommendations suggested by GenAI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude. Traditionnally, when you asked Google for accommodations in New York City, you would get a listing with a bunch of hotels, and you'd have to use filters in order to get anything interesting.

Perplexity's shift to CPM is validating for luxury and lifestyle hospitality marketers. Attribution broke long ago for high-consideration, high-value travel purchases like hotels, resorts, and cruises. 7-14 day click windows work for a $20 t-shirt (no dependencies), not a $1,000/night hotel room (plenty of dependencies like booking flights, etc.).