Updated August 2026
A 150-room independent hotel with a fixed Q4 budget usually gets two competing recommendations. Put the money into search and metasearch to capture travelers who are close to booking. Or put it into video and display to build awareness with travelers who have not started looking yet.
Most hoteliers pick one lane and defend it hard, because it is easier to justify a single number to ownership than to explain two tactics working on two different timelines. That instinct is understandable. It is also a big reason hotel marketing budgets underperform. Brand awareness vs. direct response marketing gets framed as a choice, but the two are not competing tactics. They are two stages of the same booking journey, and each one makes the other more effective.
Brand awareness marketing is advertising built to put a hotel in front of travelers before they start actively comparing properties, so the hotel is already familiar by the time a booking decision gets made. It is not asking for a click or a reservation. It is buying recall.
For hotel marketers, this usually runs through display advertising, native placements, social, and video. A traveler who sees a hotel's video or display creative in June, while still dreaming about a trip, is more likely to click that hotel's name over an unfamiliar competitor when they finally search "boutique hotels in [city]" in September. The ad in June did not generate a booking. It shaped which name felt trustworthy months later.
Brand awareness campaigns are typically measured on:
Direct response marketing is advertising built to get an immediate booking from a traveler who is already comparing properties and ready to act. It carries a specific call to action, usually some version of "Book Now," and it runs through channels built for intent, like search engine marketing, metasearch, and retargeting aimed at travelers who already visited the hotel's website.
Because every dollar in a direct response campaign can be traced to a click and, often, a booking, it is the easier budget line to defend. It is also highly refinable. A campaign underperforming on a Tuesday can be adjusted by Wednesday. A property running a last-minute weekend promotion can launch a metasearch push on Monday and see bookings by Thursday, something an awareness campaign was never built to do on that timeline.
Direct response campaigns are typically measured on:
Here is the part budget conversations usually skip. Direct response only works on travelers who already know they want to stay somewhere in a given market. It cannot create that intent. It can only capture it once it exists.
That has a real cost. A hotel running search and metasearch alone is bidding against every other hotel chasing the same already-searching travelers, which pushes prices up year over year. A hotel with no brand recognition pays full price for that traffic, every time. A hotel that has already built recall gets some of it for free, through direct site visits and branded search.
Cutting brand awareness to protect that budget backfires for the same reason. A 2025 WARC analysis found that shifting from a performance-only budget to a balanced mix of brand and performance advertising produced up to a 90% higher return on ad spend. Moving the other way, toward performance-only, produced up to a 40% drop.
The hotel-specific version of this shows up in distribution data. A 2025 survey of 700 hotel brands found OTAs generated 22% of bookings in 2024, down from 30% the year before, as hotels shifted budget and staff from distribution toward marketing, according to RateGain’s State of Distribution 2025. A traveler with no memory of a specific hotel defaults to the platform they already trust. That's usually an OTA.
A full-funnel hotel marketing strategy sequences brand awareness and direct response instead of running them as separate, unrelated campaigns. Upper-funnel channels, like video, display, and social, introduce the property to travelers who match the hotel's guest profile but have not started a specific search. Lower-funnel search and metasearch then capture the booking once the traveler is actively comparing properties.
The Sojern Traveler Ecosystem™ is what connects the two, tracking signals across flight searches, hotel searches, and destination content so a hotel can shift a traveler from the awareness audience into the direct response audience the moment they start showing intent, instead of waiting for them to search on their own.
In practice, a traveler watches a video ad for a beach destination in March, browses the hotel's website in April without booking, gets retargeted in May with an ad showing ocean-view rooms, and searches "beachfront hotel [destination]" in June, where the hotel's metasearch listing is waiting because that traveler has already been flagged as high-intent. Each stage did a different job. Skip any one of them and the traveler either never hears of your hotel or never gets the nudge to finish booking.
Independent hotels and small groups do not need six-figure budgets to run this. A hotel spending $10,000 a month can direct roughly 60% toward awareness-building channels and 40% toward search and metasearch, and adjust that ratio based on how much OTA dependency the property is trying to work down.
The mistake most hotels make in reporting is holding brand awareness spend to a direct response metric. A display campaign judged only on last-click bookings will always look like it underperformed, because that is not the job it was built to do. A brand awareness campaign that has not moved direct bookings in its first three weeks has not failed. It has not had time to work.
Track brand and performance metrics separately, and give an awareness test one full booking cycle, typically 60 to 90 days for leisure hotels, before deciding whether it earned a place in the budget.
The signal to watch is direct booking share over a full quarter, not a single campaign's last-click conversions. If awareness spend is doing its job, branded search volume and direct website traffic climb over the following one to two quarters, along with a gradual rise in direct bookings relative to OTA bookings. That is a longer window than most ownership groups expect, which is why it is worth setting before the campaign launches, not after the first month's report comes in short.
A Managed Campaign that runs both funnel stages under one reporting view makes that quarter-over-quarter comparison easier, since brand and performance data sit in the same dashboard instead of two separate platforms.
Most independent hotels are not starting from zero. They are starting from a search and metasearch program that already works, with no awareness layer above it. Shifting that budget does not require rebuilding the whole program at once.
None of this requires guessing. A hotel's own booking data usually shows exactly where OTA dependence is highest, which is the clearest signal for where awareness investment will do the most good first.
Marriott International combined upper-funnel brand awareness with lower-funnel direct response across its portfolio and achieved a 40% better conversion rate reaching travelers along their full path to purchase. Grand Hyatt Dubai ran the same play at the property level, activating display, search, and metasearch together, and grew direct bookings 16%.
Neither hotel chose brand awareness or direct response. Both ran both, on purpose, and measured them differently.
The next ownership conversation does not need to be brand versus performance. It needs a split, a measurement window longer than one month, and a plan for shifting it as OTA dependence changes.
For a deeper walkthrough of sequencing channels, messaging, and data across the full guest journey, see The Hotel Marketer's Playbook. And if it's time to see what a coordinated brand and direct response strategy could look like for your property, talk with our team.
Brand awareness marketing builds recall with travelers before they start comparing properties, using channels like display, video, and social. Direct response marketing targets travelers who are already comparing properties and ready to book, using channels like search engine marketing and metasearch with a clear call to action. Brand awareness creates future demand; direct response captures demand that already exists.
There is no fixed rule, but long-running IPA research points to roughly 60% toward brand-building and 40% toward performance channels as a starting benchmark, a range a 2025 WARC analysis reaffirmed. Hotels with heavy OTA dependence often benefit from shifting more toward brand awareness first, since that is what gives direct response something recognizable to capture.
Display advertising, video, native, and social generally serve brand awareness, since they reach travelers before an active search begins. Search engine marketing, metasearch, and retargeting generally serve direct response, since they reach travelers who are already comparing properties and close to booking. A full-funnel strategy sequences both, often using retargeting as the bridge between the two.
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