Six mistakes I keep finding in hotel marketing

The problems I find are almost never the result of laziness or bad work. They are the result of decisions that looked completely reasonable when someone made them. Somebody set a goal in an ad account.

Somebody switched off a campaign that was not producing bookings. Somebody decided the priority was more traffic.

Each choice made sense at the time. Each one turned out to cost money.

Here are six of them, with what I actually found and what happened after.

A hotel had been advertising for six months when I was brought in. The reports looked fine. Hundreds of visits every month, each one cheap. The owner could not understand why direct bookings had not moved, and the working assumption was that the market had changed or the budget was too small.

The first thing I do in any ad account is not look at keywords or creative. I look at what the account has been told to count as a success.

In this case, success was a tap on the messenger button, or a request for directions to the hotel. Not an enquiry with contact details. Not a booking. A tap.

So the system did exactly what it was asked. It went and found people who tap buttons, and it found a great many of them, cheaply. Those taps filled the reports with what looked like hundreds of leads, of which almost none turned into a stay.

The second problem was in the same account.

Search ads and ads on unrelated websites were running together in one campaign, and the results were being averaged. Search brings people who are looking for a hotel. The other kind appears next to a recipe or a news article, costs almost nothing, and produces visitors who were not planning to go anywhere. Those cheap clicks were flattering everything.

After the account was rebuilt around actual enquiries and bookings, and the two types of placement were separated, the numbers changed within one comparable period.

Cost per direct booking went from around €71 to around €17. Advertising as a share of the revenue it produced fell from 22.3% to 5.7%. The budget stayed the same. It slightly decreased.

Nothing clever happened here. The advertising had been working honestly the whole time. Nobody had told it what a result was.

Worth checking: ask whoever runs your campaigns which action is counted as a conversion. If the answer is a button tap, a phone number view or a page visit, the system is optimising towards something that is not a booking.

This one is harder to see, because the decision to stop looks well reasoned. The campaign has been running for three months, the report shows very few attributed bookings, and the money is obviously better spent elsewhere.

I understand the logic. I still think it is usually wrong, and here is why.

There are three different jobs paid advertising does for a hotel, and only one of them shows up cleanly in a report.

The first is the guest who searches for you by name. They already know you exist, from a recommendation, a list, a map, an article. This is the cheapest and most obviously profitable advertising there is, and the reports love it.

The second is the guest searching by characteristic. A spa hotel. Somewhere quiet with good food. A place that takes dogs. They do not know your name yet. They will look at your website and leave to think about it, and come back in a week or a month, if they come back at all.

The third is the guest who has not decided anything. Where to go for a few days in November. Somewhere in the mountains in winter. At this stage they are choosing an idea, not a property.

The second and third will almost never produce a booking in the same session, and it is unreasonable to expect it. What they do is get you into the shortlist a guest holds in their head before they start comparing specific options. Whoever is not in that shortlist does not exist when the decision gets made.

What I have seen happen, more than once: those campaigns get switched off as unproductive. The first month, nothing changes, which confirms the decision. Around month three, branded search starts to soften, because fewer new people are learning the hotel exists. Six months later the OTA share is visibly up, and nobody connects the two events.

There is a further complication.

A guest finds you through a campaign about spa hotels, thinks about it for two weeks, and then books through the platform where their card is already saved. Your advertising created the demand. The platform took the commission. Your report shows the advertising did nothing.

Worth checking: if campaigns were switched off for not producing immediate bookings, look at what happened to searches for your hotel name in the two or three months afterwards.

I want to show you a set of numbers that most people find uncomfortable, because it looks like something went wrong.

In one hotel project, comparing the same six months a year apart, organic search traffic fell from 10,051 visits to 7,577. That is roughly a quarter of the traffic gone.

Over the same period, the number of buyers from that traffic went from 78 to 103, and revenue from it went from about €33,600 to about €41,100.

Fewer people. More money.

If you had been watching the traffic line on a dashboard, you would have concluded the work was failing and probably asked someone to fix it.

The reason is straightforward once you see it. A lot of hotel search traffic is worth nothing. People researching a city, reading about a region, comparing prices in a market they are not going to visit. Traffic is a number that can be grown almost at will, and growing it feels like progress.

The other side of this is where the interesting work sits now. In another project, a five star boutique hotel with a genuinely strong concept was being found almost only by its own name. Anyone who did not already know the hotel never came across it. The website described comfort, service and a convenient location, which is what every hotel website describes, so there was nothing in it that could be returned as an answer to any real question.

We rebuilt the site around the questions guests were actually asking, taken from the hotel's own reviews and enquiry history. Structure, copy, a proper FAQ, articles addressing specific concerns.

What followed surprised me more than it surprised the client. Visits arriving from ChatGPT ran about four times higher than visits from a paid placement in a well known city lifestyle magazine with an audience closely matched to the hotel.

Those visits behaved better than the site average: a bounce rate of 15.5%, more than two and a half pages per visit. They produced paid bookings, from a channel with no media cost attached to it at all.

Worth checking: how much of your search traffic comes from people not searching your hotel name, and whether any of it books.

Most hotel websites answer the question "what is here". Rooms, facilities, restaurant, spa, location, gallery. All accurate, all well photographed.

The guest is asking a different question. Not what is here, but whether this is right for me.

I worked with an independent countryside hotel that had genuinely unusual assets: a working farm, horses, local food, real quiet, a location worth travelling for. The website sold rooms. Everything else was there, listed correctly, in sections a visitor had to assemble into a reason to come.

We rebuilt the whole thing around three motivations instead: coming to recover in silence, coming to explore the region, coming for the farm and what happens around it.

Same hotel, same rooms, same photographs in many cases. What changed was that the site now did the work of explaining who each version of the stay was for.

The same failure shows up in a much more expensive form with room categories.

Standard rooms sell out, suites sit empty, and everyone concludes the suites are priced too high. Then you look at the website and find the suite is a line in a list with a category name, a floor area and three photographs, exactly like the standard room but with different numbers.

A guest almost never refuses the expensive option because of the price. They refuse because nothing has explained what they would be getting for the difference. Ask an owner why their suite is worth twice the standard room and you will usually get a good answer in fifteen seconds. Then look at the website and that answer is nowhere on it.

Worth checking: open your rooms page and try to explain in one sentence, using only what is written there, why the suite costs what it costs.

There is a category of thing that cannot be advertised, because it does not exist yet as something a person can buy.

A spa with forty treatments on a list is not a product. Nobody buys a massage. They buy sleeping properly, or fixing their back, or recovering from a hard few months. A list of treatments does not answer any of that, and no amount of traffic to that list will fix it.

A low season is the same. I worked with a remote mountain retreat where winter was simply treated as the dead part of the year. Strong summer demand, almost nothing in the cold months, and the assumption that this was a fact of geography.

It was not. Winter there was genuinely spectacular, and there were people who specifically want to be somewhere beautiful and empty. What did not exist was anything they could buy: no defined offer, no page, no answers to the obvious questions about what you actually do there for a week in the cold.

We rebuilt winter as a separate product with its own positioning, addressed the main objections through content, and built the practical tools that group organisers needed to plan and enquire. Winter became a standalone line of business with real group demand, rather than a season to be discounted through.

The pattern is the same in both cases. The thing that needed selling had never been assembled into something sellable, and the marketing was being asked to compensate for that. It cannot.

Worth checking: for each of your programmes and packages, is there a page that states what is included, how long it lasts, what it costs in total, and who it suits.

I will finish with the one that costs the most and is the cheapest to fix, which is a combination I find more often than I would like.

A mountain hotel came to me because growth had stalled. Enquiries were arriving, the season was decent, and the assumption in the room was that the advertising budget needed to increase.

Before looking at the budget, I did what I always do first. I sent an enquiry through their own website, as a guest, and waited.

Nothing came back that day. Nothing came back the next day either.

When we looked at it properly, 97% of online enquiries were going unanswered within twenty four hours. People were writing in, choosing this hotel, asking a question, and hearing nothing at all.

Nothing was bought to fix this. The response process was reorganised using the tools the hotel already had. Occupancy went from 72% to 85% over four months, with no increase in advertising spend at all.

The same neglect applies to guests who have already stayed. They enjoyed it, they will come back, and when they do they will book through the platform where their details are saved, and you will pay a commission for a guest you had already won.

Marketing to people already in your own guest database costs somewhere between five and seven times less than acquiring a new one. In most independent hotels I see, those contacts exist somewhere in the booking system and nobody has ever written to them.

Worth checking: send an enquiry through your own website and time the reply. Then find out how many past guest email addresses you hold, and when the last message went out.

Not one of these six was somebody being careless.

Setting a cheap, easily achieved goal in an ad account is a reasonable thing to do. Switching off a campaign that shows no bookings is a reasonable thing to do. Wanting more traffic, describing your hotel accurately, listing your spa treatments, focusing on new guests rather than old ones: all reasonable.

They cost money anyway, and in every case I have described the fix was cheaper than the next increase in advertising budget would have been.

That is the part I would take away from this. Before spending more, it is worth knowing which of these six is happening in your hotel, and what it is costing you.