Digital marketing decoded: Budgeting 101
Digital marketing budget recommendations for growing direct bookings and revenue
A downloadable guide for hotel marketers on building a 2027 digital marketing budget using cost of acquisition, ROAS benchmarks, and direct vs. OTA net revenue comparisons.
Photo by Cendyn™
From evolving acquisition channels to rising distribution costs, hotel marketing teams have a lot to consider this budget season. Building a successful digital marketing budget for your hotel requires strategic investments in the channels and tactics that allow you to drive direct bookings away from OTAs and nurture long-term revenue growth.
Whether you're creating your first budget or refining an existing strategy, this guide is designed to help hotel marketing teams understand the essential elements that will shape revenue in the year ahead, and answer three fundamental questions: How much should we invest? Where should we invest it? And how will we know it's working?
Rather than focusing on tactics alone, we’ll discuss what benchmarks to focus on, how to calculate the true costs of each channel, and the common traps that look reassuring on a dashboard, but may be holding your revenue back.
Most hotel marketing budgets start with the same question: what percentage of revenue should we spend? It’s the wrong starting point. A boutique hotel and a 1,000 room property carry very different fixed technology costs, and a flat percentage benchmark ignores that entirely.
The better question is what it actually costs you to acquire a direct booking, and whether that cost is shrinking or growing over time. OTA commissions scale linearly forever. A well built direct channel does the opposite: the first booking from a guest is expensive, the next one is nearly free.
This guide walks through how to set a defensible 2027 budget using cost of acquisition instead of guesswork, where a strong ROAS number can actually be hiding weak growth, and what AI search and agentic booking mean for where your dollars need to go next.
What you’ll learn
Why anchoring your budget to cost of acquisition works better than a flat percentage of revenue, and what benchmark to us
Why a 15:1 ROAS can be a warning sign instead of a win
How to compare direct bookings against OTA commissions using net revenue, not booking volume
What’s changing in 2027 with AI search, agentic booking, and first-party data, and how to budget for it
Eight questions worth asking your agency before you finalize next year’s spend
Download the guide and start preparing your 2027 strategy for AI search and agentic booking, so your visibility, direct revenue, and long-term growth aren’t left to chance.
About Cendyn
Cendyn is a global hospitality cloud-based technology company that enables hotels to drive revenue, maximize profitability, and create deeper connections with guests through its integrated solutions. Serving hoteliers for nearly 30 years, Cendyn drives commercial success for hotels through its Find, Book, Grow promise: find the right guests, drive them to book direct, and grow loyalty and revenue across the spectrum of digital guest interactions.
Cendyn has over 35,000 customers worldwide in more than 150 countries generating more than $20 billion in annual hotel revenue. The company supports its growing customer base from locations across the globe, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Bangkok, and India. To find out more, visit cendyn.com