Is first-party guest data a myth or dire necessity?

Today first-party guest data is more precious than gold!

The only guest data the OTA sends to the hotel is a guest name. Everything else - email, address, prior booking history - is kept by the OTA. After booking and prior to arrival at the hotel, the guest receives at least 3 emails/messages from the OTA with info about the hotel, destination, weather, events, upgrade offers. Plus 2-3 messages immediately after arrival about the check-in, upsell offers for local tours, etc. After checkout - review your stay. After that - weekly communications, automated and drip marketing messages steering the guest to book their next trip. 

Guess who owns the guest? The hotel providing the services? Left with the housekeeping chores.

Direct online bookings are 100x more important than OTA bookings. Not only because of lower cost of acquisition, they are first-party data generators! The property’s first-party customer data is the only “single source of truth” of your guests that can be used in guest communications, guest services, CRM communications and marketing automation and drip marketing campaigns in the pre-, during- and post-stay, email marketing, personalization and digital marketing, loyalty marketing initiatives, etc. to improve dramatically the customer experience, profitability and RETENTION!

A good website/ digital marketing, a decent loyalty offer, and a solid booking engine are essential for all hotels to keep a meaningful share of guest relationships. The role of the OTA should be to bring new guests to a hotel. They excel at this as their websites are tuned for discovery. Any hotel which fails to persuade an OTA-booked guest to book future stays with them has only itself to blame. FoH staff should be all over the OTA-booked guest to gain their real email and replace the obfuscated OTA email with this. The Cost of Sale of a direct booking should be circa 7%, fully loaded costs, ie including IBE, CRM, PPC/SEO/”GEO”, in-house staff, outsourced agency staff. If the figure is 10% plus, then the hotel is failing and deserves to lose its base to OTAs. The main direct killer seems to be the booking cancellation terms. They have to be as flexible as the OTA. Offer free cancellation the day before for some rates. Also, you must be able to take the guest's credit card, pre-auth it, tokenise it, and charge it if they are a no-show. The OTAs do this well. Play their game, but better.

The debate suffers from oversimplification. First-party data is strictly contextual to the operational stage being executed—no single entity holds complete ownership.

Digital Discovery & Booking: OTAs capture top-of-funnel acquisition data for indirect channels. Hoteliers directly capture up to 30–60% of booking data upfront.

On-Property Execution: Hoteliers hold exclusive ownership of stay-related behavior, F&B preferences, and physical service interactions.

Booking a room has been a commercial commodity for decades. Executing hospitality is not.

No guest vacations on a booking engine. The product—the resort, physical environment, and service delivery—occurs entirely within the hotel's domain. Unless a guest explicitly shares on-property behavioral data back to third parties, it remains strictly within the business that delivered the stay.

First-party data is a stage-of-journey asset:

OTAs own the search, discovery, and transaction routing data.

Hoteliers own the real-world execution, stay behavior, and experience data.

Hoteliers do not need to out-build OTAs on top-of-funnel booking engines. The real opportunity lies in leveraging their unique agency at the point of service delivery, using integrated operational technology to execute against the rich behavioral data captured on property.

Is first party data, or any data a dire necessity? I'll let that one hang..

It is neither myth nor luxury; it is the precondition for controlling a hotel's own commercial destiny.

The "myth" argument conflates two failures. Yes, most hoteliers have underinvested in direct channels for decades, and that failure lies with the industry, not the OTAs. But this does not render first-party data optional; it explains why so few hotels hold any meaningful volume of it. Absence of a capability is not evidence the capability is irrelevant.

OTAs have not stolen the guest relationship so much as hoteliers ceded it, one convenient booking at a time, by treating distribution as demand generation rather than a data and relationship strategy. Every reservation flowing through an OTA without a corresponding CRM record or consent capture is a permanently lost opportunity to build direct value.

The dire necessity is not data for its own sake. It is the operational discipline behind it: a website that converts, a booking engine that captures consent, a CRM that is genuinely used, and a team trained to act on what the data shows. Technology alone will not correct thirty years of underinvestment. Execution will.

Ownership of guest data without the operational capability to act on it is merely another dashboard nobody consults.

The premise both sides share is wrong. Every hotel already collects first-party data: stay history in the PMS, rates and restrictions in the RMS, abandoned searches in the booking engine, consent state in the ESP, requests in an inbox. It sits in separate vendor schemas that were never orchestrated to talk to each other, so hotels report on it and almost never act on it.

That is what the OTAs took. Not the guest record, which the hotel still holds, but the ability to use it while it is still worth something: a single identifier, a single system, an offer sent before the traveller books elsewhere. Hotels own the data. OTAs own the moment it becomes useful.

Blaming the hotelier's website is the weaker argument, and it has a shelf life. Once an agent does the searching and books on the guest's behalf, there is no website left to be bad at. The touchpoints that argument rests on stop existing.

What survives is the data a hotel already holds and cannot yet act on. Unify it now, while it is still the asset nobody else can take.

There's a question hoteliers have asked for years, that no OTA will ever be able to ask: "What brings you to this part of the world?". The answer can unlock everything from personalised service and operational adjustments to new revenue opportunities and marketing intelligence. A marathon, family birthday, relocation or early flight each calls for a different response, sometimes involving an upsell and sometimes simply knowing when to do less. AI’s role is not in asking the question, but in turning the answer into concrete, property-specific actions and routing them to the right department. It scales the instinct that used to live in the concierge's head and walked out the door when they left.

That's not a data advantage OTAs neglect. It's one they structurally cannot reach, because they have no conversational surface with guests. They can infer intent from search behaviour. They can't ask a question and get a response.

The real bottleneck is that most hotels have nowhere to capture this context or ensure it survives a shift change. Platforms like Hudini close this gap by connecting in-stay touchpoints with PMS, POS and CRM systems. Hotels may not win the first-party data battle with OTAs, but they can win the conversation.

First-party guest data is a dire necessity for survival, not a myth.

However, both sides of that LinkedIn debate are touching on harsh, uncomfortable truths about how the modern hospitality landscape operates.

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Why Side A is right: OTAs have built an incredibly slick digital customer journey. They use billions of dollars in tech spend to capture the traveller early. When a guest books via an OTA, the hotel receives an encrypted proxy email (like @guest.booking.com) and zero behavioural insights. The OTA effectively "owns" the digital relationship, leaving the hotel with the operational overhead.

Why Side B is right: Hoteliers are often their own worst enemies. For decades, many properties treated their website as a static brochure rather than an active sales funnel. If a hotel fails to capture a guest's real email at check-in, doesn't track their stay preferences, or sends generic spam instead of personalised offers, they are practically handing the guest back to the OTA.

First-party guest data is a myth? Try telling the OTAs that.

Knowing who’s shopping helps a hotel draw on previous stays, recognize preferences and loyalty benefits, and create something more attractive than the generic stuff that pops out of the CRS for a mystery guest. If the OTA channel can’t support that exchange during shopping, identifying the guest at booking at least gives the hotel a head start on preparing the stay.

And yes, hotels were slow to improve their websites. But even a dozen excellent hotel websites still means visiting a dozen websites. OTAs offered a useful shortcut. Most people want to book a vacation, not take on a second job researching one.

Personal agents could, and I think will, change that. An agent has the patience to shop across properties and, with the guest’s permission, tell each hotel what matters. Hotels could then make richer offers, even to guests they’ve never hosted, and the agent could evaluate them.

Is access to the OTA’s guest data a necessity for survival? No. Is guest understanding a powerful tool? Absolutely. Agentic commerce could open more opportunities for direct bookings, with hotels learning what guests want while there’s still an opportunity to win their business.

First-Party Guest Data: Myth or Dire Necessity? Wrong Question.

A LinkedIn debate split into two camps: OTAs monopolized the guest relationship through data ownership versus first-party data is a myth, and the fault lies with hoteliers who never built a decent website. Both camps are right, and both are missing the point.

First-party data is not a myth. Every reservation and loyalty touch a hotel captures directly is a fact about that guest no OTA can see, and it compounds across stays and properties. Calling that a myth is simply wrong.

But owning the data was never the hard step. Acting on it is. A CRM nobody uses to personalize, price, or staff around isn't an asset, it's a filing cabinet. OTAs didn't win with better data; they won by turning mediocre data into a faster, easier booking experience at every decision point. That's an execution gap, not a data-ownership gap.

So the verdict: first-party data is a dire necessity and the one lever OTAs structurally can't replicate, but only for hoteliers who treat it as an operating system, not an archive.

Own the data. Then act like it.

First-party guest data is neither a myth nor a magical solution.   

Managing first-party data directly is an operational necessity for hotels aiming to protect their margins and long-term independence, which does make that data a ‘dire necessity’. But its value lies in execution, not possession.  

OTAs continue to dominate the digital acquisition funnel. Yet the hotel controls the guest's physical stay, creating opportunities for high-touch, real-world engagement.  As third-party tracking becomes increasingly limited under stricter privacy rules, owned data is becoming an essential marketing foundation for hotels. More importantly, this clean data can help hotels harness AI to deliver better experiences and unlock direct revenue.   

While OTAs know a traveller’s dates and budget, hotels can understand their unique requirements like room preferences, dining habits, and stay history; insights that enable more relevant engagement, personalised experiences, and ancillary revenue.   

However, data alone does not generate value if a hotel lacks the digital infrastructure to act on it.   

Complete reliance on guest data without a modern website, frictionless booking engine, and attentive service is just as flawed as relying entirely on OTAs.  First-party data is not a complete solution, but managing it effectively is an essential requirement for long-term financial autonomy. 

From my perspective, the idea of fully owning first-party guest data is largely a myth, for the simple reason that the hotel booking journey is inherently fragmented.

Travellers interact with multiple touchpoints, platforms, intermediaries and stakeholders before, during and after their stay. As a result, obtaining a complete and coherent view of the guest across the entire journey is practically impossible.

Hospitality is not Amazon. There is no single, closed ecosystem in which every search, interaction, transaction and preference can be captured and connected to one customer profile.

First-party data is therefore not a myth in itself. It remains extremely valuable and hotels should collect, connect and activate as much of it as possible. What is unrealistic is the idea that a hotel can ever fully own the guest relationship or obtain a complete picture of the traveller through first-party data alone.

So, first-party data is a necessity, but complete ownership of the guest journey is a myth, made largely unattainable by the fragmented nature of our industry.

First-party guest data is not a myth. It is one of the most important strategic assets hotels have – yet most fail to manage it properly.

The problem is not that OTAs “own” the guest. The problem is that OTAs have built their technology around the customer, while hotels have traditionally built their IT around the PMS. As a result, valuable guest information remains fragmented across the PMS, POS, website, booking engine, CRM, and countless other applications.

Hotels need to fundamentally rethink this architecture.

The future must be guest-centric, not PMS-centric. At its heart should be Central Guest Knowledge and a Central Guest Profile (CGP): one accurate, continuously enriched profile connecting data from every relevant touchpoint. Only then can a hotel truly understand who its guests are, individualize communication and service, and systematically create loyalty.

A loyalty program alone does not create loyalty. A CRM alone does not create guest knowledge. Technology only becomes valuable when the underlying data is centralized, cleansed and actionable.

OTAs understood this long ago. Hotels must now catch up.

The strategic question is therefore not whether hotels need first-party data. It is whether they are finally prepared to build their IT strategy around the guest.

First-party data isn't a myth, it's a mirror. It shows how much a hotel is investing in owning its guest relationship, and it varies a lot across the hotel industry.

The OTAs didn't take anything from hoteliers. They built better funnels, better personalization, a broader offer, and a great traffic acquisition machine. Meanwhile, hotel website capacities are hit or miss: some do a great job, some clearly do not.

The hotels growing direct share are the ones treating their own data (rate intelligence, guest behavior, demand signals) as seriously as OTAs treat theirs. AI now makes that gap even more binary. The tools to personalize, predict, and convert direct exist and are affordable. The excuse is gone.

So no, first-party data isn't dire necessity in the abstract. It's dire necessity for anyone who wants pricing power, guest loyalty, and margin instead of dependency.

How can all these be a myth?

* Direct bookings through the brand's website or app

* Loyalty program enrollment and activity

* Check-in/check-out systems and property management software (PMS)

* On-property purchases (spa, dining, room service, retail)

* Guest surveys, feedback forms, and reviews submitted directly

* CRM and email marketing interactions (opens, clicks, preferences)

* Concierge requests and special occasion notes

* Wi-Fi login portals

* Call center or front-desk interactions

Nothing less than a "dire necessity" as Max asks. Especially for independent properties, these are differentiators to be valued and enhanced because loyalty programs there are nonexistent or much less effective when only one or a few properties subscribe to a loyalty program. For brands, every one of these count. Owners pay franchise and marketing fees and expect access to these data.

First-party data is absolutely essential to deliver great guest experiences, but it is useless without context. True value lies in connecting guest identity with trip-specific preferences—like knowing a guest with a US phone number prefers Spanish. This isn't a data issue; it's an operating philosophy problem.

OTAs win because they prioritize Total Customer Value over RevPAR. Their business model demands centralized guest data and a destination-first concierge mindset, serving travelers regardless of reservation status. In contrast, hotels fragment data across siloed systems because legacy models never forced cohesion.

Until hoteliers build unified guest profiles and measure Total Customer Value, the first-party data debate remains purely academic.