Are We Overestimating Specialisation in Hotel Marketing?

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. We still need experts who deeply understand analytics, SEO, advertising, CRM, revenue management, and technology. The problem arises when specialization creates silos and professionals fail to see how their decisions affect the entire customer journey.

AI makes this issue even more interesting across disciplines. As technical answers become easier to obtain, specialized knowledge alone may become less differentiating. What becomes more valuable is knowing which questions to ask, how different functions connect, and how to translate a business problem into coordinated action. Hotels therefore need more “connectors,” professionals with sufficient knowledge across multiple domains who can diagnose problems, communicate with specialists, and keep everyone focused on the same business outcome.

I would not suggest replacing specialists with generalists. Instead, good teams need a better balance between depth and breadth. In an AI-mediated workplace, the most valuable professionals may combine deep expertise in one area with broad understanding across others and the ability to connect people, technology, and business objectives.

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. I was one of them. Not any more! Digital marketing has become so complex, so technology-driven that it requires highly specialized knowledge and expertise. 

At my company NextGuest, now merged with Cendyn, we had 150 top notch specialists, masters of their trade in specialized departments: account managers, SEO, Content Marketing, Search Marketing, Online Media, Social Media, CRM, Analytics, Website Design, Digital Media Design, Front End Developers, Software and Application Developers, Project Managers, etc. 

The Executive Team and account managers must understand the big picture, of course, to develop the strategy and tactics for each of the above departments and each and every client and situation. This is done through analysis of the hotel pain points and current digital assets, past successes and failures, identifying the right tools, technologies and approaches, and ideation of an action plan to remedy the situation and achieve the property’s objectives.

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 scarce skill is increasingly the ability to define the real problem, understand its commercial and operational consequences, connect different systems and judge whether an AI-generated answer is actually correct. AI can explain how to configure tracking; it cannot automatically know that a tracking problem is why direct bookings collapsed after a website launch.

This does not mean specialists are becoming irrelevant. The impact depends heavily on the field, and deep expertise remains essential wherever risk, accountability or complex judgment is involved. But the specialist who understands only one isolated discipline is more exposed than before.

In hospitality, where marketing, distribution, revenue management, technology and operations constantly overlap, the most valuable person may be the one who can move across these worlds: asking the right questions, translating between teams and keeping everyone focused on the business outcome rather than departmental responsibilities. Generalists are not replacing experts; they are orchestrating them.

AI does not shrink the need for that connector role, rather, it raises the stakes. AI can connect the dots across a fragmented stack: draft the ticket, summarise the anomaly, suggest why direct bookings dropped after a website launch. That is exactly where it gets dangerous, because a specialist who only knows paid media cannot tell whether the model's read on a tracking gap is correct or invented. Checking that answer takes the same cross-domain fluency the connector role already needs: enough GTM, GA4, booking-engine and CRM knowledge to notice when the output doesn't match the data.

Using AI well operationally raises the bar further. It means wiring analytics, ad accounts, the website, the booking engine and the CRM together, then feeding the model clean, normalised data instead of five inconsistent exports. That is technical breadth, not one skill applied harder.

The generalist is arguably in a stronger competitive position today than before AI, precisely because telling a correct answer from a plausible-sounding wrong one only works for someone who understands how the whole system fits together. Specialist knowledge is getting commoditised, knowing where the pieces connect is not.

I would say that we have always required the knowledge of how 'all the pieces fit together'. That is the 'specialization'.

Complexity is complexity in any form. The more parts and pieces - the more convoluted the process or program. The greater opportunity for breakage and disconnect.

A metaphor for the business of hospitality through technology.

Change that reality and you change your world for the better. In more ways than can be counted.

I think the problem isn't specialisation itself, but having too many people focused only on their own area.

Hotels need specialists, but they also need people who understand how everything connects.

When something goes wrong, the hotelier doesn't care which department is responsible — they just want the problem fixed.

As AI makes specialist tasks easier and cheaper, people who can connect the dots, understand the bigger picture and get the right teams working together may become even more valuable.

I think it depends on what we mean by specialisation..

The problem begins when expertise becomes fragmentation - as pointed out. A hotel can have excellent specialists managing individual platforms, channels or stages of the funnel, while lacking someone who understands how all those pieces affect one another and, ultimately, the guest journey. Distribution influences pricing, pricing affects acquisition, acquisition generates data, data should inform CRM and personalisation, and all of this has to remain consistent with the brand and the overall business strategy.

In that sense, the real competitive advantage may no longer be knowing one tool exceptionally well, but being able to connect the dots.

AI is likely to accelerate this shift. As more operational and platform-specific tasks become automated or AI-assisted, the value of purely executional specialisation may decrease. At the same time, the value of people who can understand systems, interpret data, connect disciplines and make strategic decisions across them will increase.

Hotel marketing still needs specialists with important orchestration ability.

We don't need fewer specialists. We need specialists who speak hotel, not just their own department.

The hotelier shouldn't have to diagnose the problem before they're allowed to ask for help. That's fair. But the fix isn't less specialization, it's specialization aimed at the wrong layer.

What actually solves this is hospitality-specific expertise, not general marketing expertise. Someone who already knows how the website, booking engine, CRM, paid media, SEO, and analytics connect, because they've seen that exact stack break in the exact same way at another property last month. That's not generalist knowledge. It's specialized knowledge, just specialized in hospitality instead of a single channel.

That context is what lets a hotelier bring the business problem instead of the technical ticket. "Direct bookings disappeared after the site launch" is enough. Someone with that context already knows to check tracking continuity between the CMS and the booking engine, because they've triaged that failure before.

So no, I don't think the industry is overinvesting in specialists. It's investing in the wrong axis of specialization: channel expertise instead of hospitality expertise. The da Vincis this business needs aren't generalists. They're hotel people first, channel experts second.

Yes, generally speaking, hospitality over-specializes. And, yes, this contributes to poor performance in the immediate term from the lack of “big picture thinking". 

More damaging long-term, however, is that hyper-specialization can lead strong performers to look outside hospitality for their long-term career development. The well-known lack of clear advancement opportunities only compounds that risk.

A similar outcome often occurs on-property with the marketing team of one, who can’t grow because they’re stretched too thin.

As research from the HSMAI Foundation found, upskilling and reskilling are critical components of retaining talent. And either way, the high turnover and long lead time to onboard/train new staff further hurts long-term business performance.

Savvy hotel owners/operators are increasingly focused on creating opportunities for overall career growth among their team members. That includes cross-training, breaking down silos, and developing commercial strategy teams to share knowledge and opportunities.

Hoteliers interested in the long-term growth of their business must look after the long-term growth of their teams. Specialists and generalists both can have their place. But neither will stick around unless they’re shown that a career in hospitality will help them grow — and advance — too. 

I’d take it one step further: every specialist involved can do their job perfectly, and the project can still be a mess.

Because the problem often lives between the website and the IBE, between GTM and the consent manager, between advertising and analytics, somewhere among DNS, redirects, APIs and the tech stack. Somewhere in a Burroughsian, liminal “Interzone” (“And I was looking for some friend of mine / Yeah, looking for some friends of mine!”).

And that’s the paradox: nobody owns the intersections.

That’s why I think the increasingly valuable role is the orchestrator/translator. Someone who knows enough (but not everything) about enough things to understand dependencies, ask the right questions, translate between departments and, most importantly, OWN the problem until it’s damn solved.

AI makes this even more interesting. If vertical expertise becomes cheaper (and, eventually, commoditised), then value moves somewhere else: from knowing something to knowing WHAT you need to know, WHEN you need to know it, and HOW that knowledge connects to everything else.

I think Leonardo today would be the guy who, while twelve people are discussing twelve different Zendesk tickets, suddenly realises they’re all trying to solve the same F- problem.

I think that as an industry we were hoping that AI itself would fulfil this ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ role, but that may not be the case. AI has raised the floor for specialist analysis, but is largely lacking the big picture of hospitality specific systems, booking engines, metasearch feeds, PMS and the implications any changes might have on business outcomes.

Experience in translating business problems into technical language and vice-versa is a skill that risks becoming scarce. It requires an overview of how a hotel’s digital systems connect, where to look first if something breaks and who to ask for more information when needed. It is still a human role.

Knowledge counts and can be assisted via AI, but it is not enough. Silos hurt most when everyone owns a component but nobody owns the outcome. This is where the role sitting above the specialists becomes most valuable, providing it comes with a mandate. Diagnosing a problem with no authority to push the fix still cannot solve it and confidently sending tickets to the wrong team can complicate rather than help.

Who fills it varies by the size of the property and team but it is a critical role.

Whew, I feel this one. Hotel marketing is complex and sometimes we drown in the minutiae. I generally see hotel marketers that are focused on:

1) creative/branding/content strategy and

2) digital/performance/SEO/GEO/analytics

But, sometimes those same marketers fall into running basic ads that don't drive the needle, updating photos, fixing content scores on OTAs, none of which has them sitting in a true strategy position. They are told to do more with less, while overseeing 10, 20 or 30 hotels.

Alternatively, we have people in commercial roles that do not understand the complexities of marketing.

With all that said, I agree that many hotel marketers live in silos and big agencies have not helped that mindset. The value in future hotel marketers is the strategic, critical thinking and how the pieces work together.

Understanding how all the "cogs" fit is rooted in our company name...

Has the industry overindexed on specialists? What comes to mind is the line "Jack of all trades, master of none" - which applies if you're a plumber managing an isolated system. But hotel marketing involves multiple interdependent systems.

Specialists are still required, but that often comes with a performance structure that applies only to their "lane." The hotel still needs to pull together how all of these "lanes" connect to tell how the entire system is working (or not).

The term "people silos" fits. It often means that the hotel moves more slowly and doesn't go as far as it could. A dot-connector, or, as I say, a strategist, can look across silos and give the hotel a unified view that ladders up to its goals.

When symptoms show up, the strategist has a broader view than any one lane and can mobilize the fix. What matters also is that the strategist shares that thinking with the team. That's how a team levels up and the hotel gets faster at spotting what needs attention.

AI will take on more of the repetitive tasks and reporting. Knowing what to do with what it surfaces is where the dot-connecting strategist earns their keep.