Marketing & Guest Loyalty

Tempted by big audiences and the lure of impressive returns, hotels often want to keep the number of email addresses in their databases high. But this is actually the downfall of many email marketing strategies.

Oh great, another article about AI.

Running a hotel today can feel like captaining a ship through stormy waters. Guest expectations rise like relentless waves. OTA commissions drag on profits like heavy currents. Staff row tirelessly, yet exhaustion spread across the deck. Some days, survival feels like the only option.

As a conference speaker and hotel trainer, I’m always interested whenever I see the title of an article, book, or blog post that has anything to do with guest service, hospitality, or customer service in general.

Picture this: Caroline is a business traveler who has stayed at your hotel before and has left glowing reviews. On her previous trips, she has always stopped at your gift store after checkout to buy her young kids gifts. Imagine utilizing hotel guest segmentation to send Caroline an offer to bring her young kids with her to celebrate the holiday season. You list the right room options, include information about the kids’ club, and offer a spa voucher for the afternoon when kids are enjoying themselves at the club. Booking is easy.

I’ve worked in hotel tech long enough to know that most meaningful changes don’t arrive with a bang. They come in crawling in quietly, before they begin to walk. But they reshape our operations one baby step, one workflow, one guest interaction at a time. But every so often, multiple changes come together in a way that completely redefines the landscape. Right now, we’re seeing exactly that.

For too long, the debate around hotel distribution has been framed within a deceptively simple equation: place the commission paid to an OTA on one side, measure the acquisition cost of a direct booking on the other, and then declare whichever is lower the winning option. If a marketing campaign produces a cost per acquisition above the sacred 20 percent commission threshold, it is quickly branded as inefficient, a waste of money, an error to be avoided. This binary reasoning, however, is an intellectual shortcut that strips the discussion of its deeper meaning. It overlooks the fundamental truth that the direct channel is not merely another distribution outlet in a portfolio of options, but the sovereign foundation of the hotel itself, the only arena where control over communication, guest data, and the relationship can be fully maintained.

Recently, a client reached out to me, concerned that their customer service was slipping. Due to supply issues, they weren’t fulfilling orders on time, and customers were complaining. Some had even started to source their products from other vendors.

Wine has long been perceived as a male-dominated world. For centuries, symbolic authority, from inheritance in family domains to the role of the “master winemaker”, has largely been coded as masculine. Women were present, often as vineyard workers or “wine widows” taking over after a husband’s death, but their visibility and recognition were limited. Today, the landscape is changing. In some oenology programs, women now make up the majority of students, and in countries such as Spain and Italy, close to a third of wineries are led or owned by women. Yet this presence is not evenly reflected across positions of leadership and prestige.

Artificial intelligence is already transforming the way our industry operates, and its impact is only going to accelerate. The way travelers discover, evaluate, and book hotels is being rewritten in real time, and operators like us need to adapt quickly to stay relevant.