Do We Need More Leonardo da Vinci in Hotel Marketing?

For decades, we’ve rewarded hyper-specialisation: learn MORE about LESS.

Become an SEO expert. A Social Media Manager. Master your niche, and let everyone else worry about theirs.

And yet, every time I work on a new project, I find myself wishing I had a couple of "Leonardos" on the team.

Some context: I’m currently working on two new projects. One is the launch of a website for a hotel group. The other is a digital agency transition for another. On paper, they’re quite different, but in reality, both are ultimately about orchestration.

Launching a hotel website has very little to do with making it “beautiful.” It means coordinating design, analytics, tracking, consent management, IBE integrations, CRMs, advertising platforms, APIs, redirects, DNS records and dozens of invisible dependencies that nobody notices until something breaks (and it always does).

Changing agencies follows the same pattern. Permissions need to be transferred, Ads accounts reconnected, GTM containers verified, etc. And, every single time, you discover that a (critical) account is still tied to the personal email address of a receptionist who left five years ago.

Both projects typically involve a dozen stakeholders, all great at what they do. Yet very few understand the system as a whole. The result is what I call #PeopleSilos.

How many times have you heard stuff like:
“We need a ticket for that.”
“Tracking doesn’t handle this.”
“Please contact the advertising team.”
“That’s managed by another department.”

But hotels don’t think in departments. A hotelier doesn’t wake up wondering whether they need cross-domain tracking. They wake up wondering why bookings suddenly disappeared after launching a new website. Expecting them to formulate the correct technical request is naive.

And this is why I think we, today more than ever, need “department-translators”. Someone who understands enough of everything to recognise the real problem, translate it into the lingo of the appropriate technical team, open a Zendesk ticket, and keep the process moving until it’s solved.

Ironically, even if I’ve been called “futurist” many times, I'm not particularly technical. I still get lost inside Google Tag Manager. I freak out when I open Meta Business, and my son can code better than me (he's 5).

But that’s the point. Project managers need to know just enough to connect all departments into a functioning system.

This, I believe, is what’s increasingly missing from many agencies (and universities, and MBAs) today.

For years we’ve been told that the future belongs to specialists. You know what? I suspect the opposite is true (and don't forget AI is rapidly commoditising specialist knowledge).

Leonardo became LEONARDO because he refused to accept that engineering, anatomy, architecture and art belonged in separate worlds.

Perhaps hotel marketing needs a few more people like that.