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Hotel marketing works best when you start with the business problem, not the channel. A property that needs to build awareness among new travelers has a different priority from one trying to increase direct bookings, fill low-demand dates, improve advertising efficiency, or bring past guests back.
That's why there's no single hotel marketing strategy that fits every property. Your audience, demand patterns, and business goals should determine where you invest and how you measure success. This guide organizes 13 strategies around the five outcomes hotels most often need to solve for: creating demand, increasing direct bookings, filling low-demand periods, improving advertising performance, and driving repeat stays.
This is a strategy guide, not a channel guide. If you already know you want the channel-by-channel breakdown, Hotel Marketing Channels: 9 That Actually Drive Bookings walks through which channels to use and why. What follows here starts one step earlier: which of these five outcomes matches the problem you actually have, the specific strategies that solve it, and how to tell whether what you're already running is working.
Demand-generation strategies reach travelers before they're actively searching for a hotel. Instead of waiting for a high-intent search, you can use travel behavior, destination interest, and useful content to enter the planning journey early.
Demographic targeting tells you who a traveler is. Travel intent tells you what they're actually considering and where they are in the planning journey, which is the more useful signal for deciding where to spend. Travel-specific signals worth building audiences around include destination and accommodation searches, travel dates and booking windows, room or property page views, trip-planning content engagement, and previous interactions with your website or offers.
A resort can prioritize travelers researching its destination. A city property can focus on travelers planning trips during the periods when it needs additional demand. The Sojern Traveler Ecosystem™ gives hotels access to real-time travel intent signals across the industry, so targeting reflects where demand is actually heading, not just who a traveler is on paper.
Paid social, video, and connected TV (CTV) reach travelers earlier in the journey, while they're still deciding where to go and where to stay. Visual formats let a hotel show the destination and guest experience before a traveler is comparison-shopping rates. The goal isn't an immediate booking from every impression. It's putting the property in front of relevant travelers early enough to shape consideration before the booking search even starts.
Travelers research a destination before they research a hotel. They're looking for things to do, neighborhoods to explore, or events to attend before deciding where to stay, which means destination content is often the first place your property can show up. Useful formats include things-to-do guides, seasonal event guides, neighborhood guides, and itineraries. A beach resort can build content around nearby beaches and seasonal activities while naturally showing how the property fits into that experience, without turning every page into a pitch.
OTAs help hotels reach travelers at scale, but that reach costs 15% to 25% in commission per booking, and it comes with less control over the guest relationship and guest data. 18% of travelers who start their search on an OTA go on to book directly, up 3.3 percentage points year over year, according to SiteMinder. That swing is winnable with the right strategy.
Every channel, from paid search to social to retargeting, sends travelers to your website. If the booking path has friction, the rest of the strategy is working against itself. Start with a booking CTA that stays visible on room, rate, and offer pages, rates and availability shown early without forcing travelers through extra pages first, a mobile-first experience travelers can complete without excessive scrolling, landing pages that match the campaign rather than the homepage, and a booking path with the unnecessary steps removed.
A traveler who clicks a weekend-package ad and lands on your homepage has to re-find the offer, re-confirm the dates, and re-decide whether to keep going. The same traveler landing on a page built for that exact package, with the rate and dates already visible, skips all three steps. That gap is often the difference between a campaign that converts and one that just drives traffic.
Metasearch captures travelers who've moved past general research and are actively comparing properties and rates. 26% of travelers now start their hotel search on Booking.com, ahead of Google, according to SiteMinder, which makes showing up competitively at the comparison stage essential rather than optional. To get real value from metasearch advertising, keep rates and availability accurate against your own booking engine, monitor your direct rate against OTA and competitor rates, use direct-booking links so comparing and booking take one step, adjust bids by market and booking window rather than treating every impression the same, and measure the full path to booking, not just clicks.
Paid search captures travelers actively searching for your property, your destination, or a specific kind of stay. Build campaigns around brand-name searches, destination-plus-hotel searches, and need-period searches for the dates you're trying to fill. Branded search also protects you when OTAs are bidding on your hotel's own name. Staying present there gives travelers a direct path to your property instead of comparing through another channel first.
Not every website visitor is ready to book on the first visit. Retargeting through display and SEM reconnects with travelers who've already shown interest, and the message should match the strength of that signal. A traveler who viewed a room or searched availability has shown stronger intent than one who just visited the homepage. Reinforce availability and value for the first group. Use broader destination or property messaging for the second.
Low-demand periods are where targeted marketing has the most room to move the needle. Focus on the dates, markets, and traveler segments where additional demand actually affects revenue.
A discount alone doesn't always give travelers a reason to change their plans. Offers built around weekend trips, extended stays, seasonal packages, local events, or midweek incentives give travelers a specific occasion to book, not just a lower price.
Your strongest feeder markets shift with seasonality and the type of demand you need. Prioritize markets that consistently convert during the periods you're trying to grow, expand into new markets when occupancy is soft, and narrow targeting when specific dates are already filling.
A property that fills easily from a 200-mile radius on weekends may need to reach a completely different, farther-out audience to fill a Tuesday in February. Treating both periods as the same targeting problem usually means overspending on demand you'd have gotten anyway and underspending on the dates that actually needed help.
Performance improves when campaigns are aligned with traveler intent and the audiences, creative, and channels that are actually driving results.
A traveler exploring destinations needs to be inspired with destination and property visuals. A traveler comparing properties needs differentiation on rooms, amenities, and location. A traveler who's already engaged needs reinforcement through reviews and relevant offers. A traveler close to booking needs a clear, direct reason to act now. Matching messaging to mindset keeps a traveler from seeing a hard sell too early or a soft inspiration ad too late in their decision.
Personalization is what makes the strategies above compound instead of compete. McKinsey research shows personalization can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50% and lift marketing ROI by 10% to 30%, a direct offset against the commission a hotel loses to OTA bookings. Use destination interest to shape the message, continue the thread when a traveler has viewed a specific room, and match the offer to where a traveler actually is: inspiration for someone still researching, availability and value for someone already comparing rooms.
Establish a performance baseline before testing, define a clear hypothesis for each test, and change one meaningful variable at a time. Changing audience, creative, offer, and market simultaneously makes it impossible to know what actually moved the result. Apply what you learn to where you invest next, not just to the next campaign.
Travelers rarely move from discovery to booking through a single channel. Define the role each channel plays. Use social or CTV for awareness, display for consideration, and search or metasearch for conversion, and build audiences that carry travelers from one stage into the next rather than treating each channel's performance in isolation.
Acquiring a new guest is only half the return on a marketing strategy. The other half is whether that guest books directly again. Strengthening this starts with first-party data capture at every touchpoint, from booking to check-in to post-stay follow-up. Segment past guests by stay history and preferences rather than messaging every returning guest the same way, and build rebooking offers around what they've actually shown interest in before.
A hotel that's consistently acquiring new guests but seeing flat repeat demand doesn't necessarily need another acquisition channel. It needs a stronger post-stay strategy connected to the same data already driving acquisition.
Strong or weak performance doesn't always point to an obvious cause. A campaign can generate plenty of traffic without generating bookings. Booking volume can climb while acquisition cost climbs faster. A strategy can work well overall while quietly underperforming in the one market or need period you actually built it for. Use what you're seeing to work backward to the actual problem before shifting budget, rather than assuming the first metric that looks off is the real one.
There's no single hotel marketing strategy that fits every property or every point in the demand cycle. If travelers aren't yet considering your property, prioritize demand-generation strategies. If they're already searching, shift toward capturing and converting that demand directly. If occupancy is strong overall but soft on specific dates, target those dates and markets specifically rather than adjusting the whole calendar. If acquisition is healthy but repeat bookings aren't, the next investment is likely post-stay engagement, not another new channel.
These aren't one-time decisions. A property that spent Q1 building destination-led content to fix an awareness gap may spend Q3 fighting acquisition cost creep after that content starts converting. The strategy that got you here usually isn't the one that gets you to the next problem, which is why this is worth revisiting by quarter rather than setting once a year.
If you're not sure which of these to prioritize first, that's usually a sign it's worth reviewing where your current spend is and isn't converting. Let's talk about which of these strategies makes sense for your property right now.
Hotel marketing budgets vary based on factors such as property size, market, seasonality, occupancy goals, and distribution strategy. Rather than applying a fixed percentage, evaluate how much investment is needed to achieve specific revenue or occupancy goals and use campaign performance to determine where additional budget can generate incremental value.
Hotels can strengthen their direct proposition without relying solely on discounts. Clear booking experiences, relevant packages, value-added benefits, strong property positioning, and marketing that reaches travelers based on their actual travel intent can give guests more reasons to consider booking directly.
Yes. Past guests already have a relationship with the property, so their messaging can reflect previous interactions, stay history, or relevant reasons to return. New travelers generally require more context about the destination, property, and experience. Separating these audiences can make marketing more relevant and help hotels avoid treating every traveler the same.
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