Hospitality Marketing Guides for Luxury
Hotels, Resorts, and Cruise Lines
The Most Expensive Problem in Luxury Hotel Marketing Is the One the Industry Doesn’t See
Luxury hotels rarely believe they have a structural marketing problem. When performance weakens, the diagnosis is almost always the same. Campaigns need improvement. SEO needs adjustment. Creative should evolve. Media allocation must be reconsidered. In other words, the industry assumes the problem lies in execution. But execution is rarely the …
Why OTA Dependence Survives Rational Executives
Every senior hospitality executive reading this knows the number. The OTA commission line. The percentage. The annual total. It is on the report. It has been on the report for years. In many cases it represents the single largest controllable cost on the property P&L, running between fifteen and twenty-five …
The Day We Stopped Renting Our Guests
The presentation lasted forty-five minutes. The math was clear. The mechanism was explained. The CMO understood both. She went back to her desk and did nothing. Not because she disagreed. Not because the numbers were wrong. Because the thing being described was going to take eighteen months to compound, and …
Why Hotels Could Never Build Their Own OTA
Every few years the conversation resurfaces. A hotel conference panel. A trade publication opinion piece. A LinkedIn thread from someone who just paid their monthly Expedia commission statement. The question is always the same: why didn’t hotels just build their own platform? It sounds reasonable. Hotels had the inventory. They …
The Mechanism: How OTA Dependence Actually Works
A prior piece on this site posed Feynman’s test to the luxury hotel industry: explain OTA dependence in plain language. Not the name. The mechanism. What actually happens, step by step, at the level of data and behavior and compounding disadvantage. Most could not. This is the answer. What the …
The World Decided Not to Visit. You’re Surprised?
The government changed the welcome mat. Instead of Welcome it said Go Somewhere Else. The short yellow bus didn’t just stop. It backed up over your international guests. And somehow the luxury hotel industry is surprised. The numbers are not projections. They are not sentiment surveys. They are year-over-year arrival …
Why AGR Needs the Industry to Stay Blind Long Enough for Our Clients to Win
The luxury hotel industry has known about its OTA dependency problem for twenty years. It has studied it, debated it, presented it at conferences, and put it on the agenda at ownership meetings. Then it went back to paying the commission. If you’re reading this, AGR is probably not the …