The travel and tourism sector is predicted to grow 5.8% every year until 2032 (World Travel & Tourism Council). This should bode well for hotels.
Yet with rising costs, plus intense and growing competition – there are currently +8,000 hotel opening projects in the pipeline globally, bringing an additional 514,000 rooms (Sleeper) – things aren’t so simple in reality.
The onus is increasingly on hotel marketing and revenue teams to drive demand and revenue in an operating environment that gets tougher every day. So what are they doing right now to evolve, compete, and thrive?
We’re going on tour with Travel Market Life for a series of Hotelier Roundtable Discussions – designed to get to the root of where we are, and how to make progressive change for the better. Here’s what hoteliers had to share at the Independent Hotel Show, London 2025 (IHS 2025), when we got together to discuss this very subject.
Defining resilient features will determine a hotel’s future
Standing the test of time as a hotel ultimately comes down to being reactive to the world around us. So what are hotels grappling with right now, and what are they focusing their time and energy on?
According to Inna Nekrassova, Director of Revenue at Hotel Café Royal, new hotel openings are having a particular impact on the luxury market. “Luxury hotels in London are quite resilient and there’s enough demand,” she said. “But hotels are having to become more creative in the ways they make money and attract clientele, including forming interesting partnerships and collaborations.”
Parity is another issue hoteliers agree is a major challenge, despite technology that’s in place to help hotels manage rates. Nekrassova describes it as the “three-headed dragon” – you chop one head off, and lower rates suddenly appear somewhere else.
In 75% of hotel rate searches, at least one online travel agency (OTA) shows a lower price than the hotel’s own website (123Compare.me).
Adam Hamadache, a marketing expert from Formula, believes this is partly due to subsidiary companies. “Even though you’re not giving your inventory to some of these OTAs, low rates are appearing,” he said. “You need to keep on top of them. It’s a challenge for direct bookings.”
So where are the opportunities for hotels to counter some of these issues?
Part of the strategy for Luxury Family Hotels is to tap into key trends arising in the travel sector, in a deep and meaningful way. Group Marketing and Revenue Director Teresa Kingston explained how Luxury Family Hotels doesn’t just allow children, their hotels actively celebrate children. At the same time, woven into each stay is delivering services to parents they really value, such as two hours of childcare a day, and helpful extras such as pushchairs and sterilising services “so they don’t have to pack the kitchen sink.”
With multi-generational travel and travel with dogs surging in popularity, the hotel group works hard to make these travellers truly welcome. And this connects with the wider trend towards experiences, which is central for Luxury Family Hotels. “As a hotelier, we’re no longer selling a bedroom,” Kingston explained. “We’re selling the experience of the area and location, and we just so happen to have a bedroom in a beautiful hotel that you can stay in.”
This approach feeds directly into building strong loyalty too, as it makes people want to return. “It’s about the emotional connection they have with the brand,” she said. “We see a lot of loyalty because we bring families in at a younger age, and then they want to return with their children.”
In-house collaboration must go further
Siloed working within hotels is an historic issue, particularly between marketing and revenue teams. But according to many hoteliers at IHS 2025, this is starting to change.
“Our marketing team and revenue team sit together,” Kingston said. “That’s very intentional. We believe that commercial performance and brand storytelling go hand in hand.”
Hotel Café Royal also recently moved its marketing and revenue teams together. “It’s been working really well,” Nekrassova said. “What helps is aligning KPIs for both departments.” By creating more clarity between the two teams about which days they need help for driving demand, and which days marketing spend isn’t necessary, they’re driving tangible results. “Marketing collaboration has been at the forefront of driving performance and profitability at Hotel Café Royale.”
According to David Ohandjanian, the founder of UP Hotel Agency, the coming together of marketing and revenue teams is enabling them to look beyond just occupancy and average daily rate (ADR). “There’s a need to look at profitability and cost per acquisition (CPA),” he said. “There’s a massive profitability area that’s ignored, and if you’re able to look at it with marketing and revenue teams in unison, it can shift the needle.”
AI does not replace human brilliance in hospitality
With the adoption of AI becoming ever-prevalent, what difference is AI making to hotel revenue and marketing? Striking the balance between technology and humans is being widely discussed in hotel circles. “We feel like we’re at a cliff at the moment,” Ohandjanian described. Yet he says many hoteliers agree that “there’s still a need for human brilliance.”
At Luxury Family Hotels, the team is using AI to support specific business needs. “We use it a lot to analyse guest data, because sometimes you can miss something,” Kingston said. “From a marketing perspective, everyone gets writer’s block. It can really help in the starting sentence to bring something to life.”
Many hotels are using Google’s Performance Max for travel goals (PMTG) to great effect. Thanks to its intelligent application of AI with guest data to find high-value audiences, acquisition costs have dropped by 19% according to Cendyn’s Hotel Digital Marketing Performance Index.
Hotels are increasingly using AI agents to support personalised guest communications too, which can in turn support upselling and revenue generation. One success story here is a WhatsApp AI agent called Amanda, built and implemented by Biteluxe for The Queen at Chester Hotel [Hoteliers’ Voice podcast with Hotel Manager of The Queen of Chester Hotel available now]. Traditional email upselling wasn’t working for the hotel, and the town centre location meant many guests were going out to local restaurants for their meals. Since Amanda was implemented, the hotel has doubled its sleeper-diner ratio.
Founder and CEO of Biteluxe, Prem Jethwa-Odedra, explained that this strategy was all about connecting with guests more deeply, and meeting them where they spend time. “For guests, WhatsApp is really easy,” he said. “From the guest perspective, when they receive a WhatApp message from the hotel – as long as it’s not a static message – guests tend to feel more cared for.”
The nature of AI also means it can learn from the interactions it has with guests to identify opportunities. This is how The Queen at Chester realised there was a market for offering early check-in for guests, after Amanda received numerous queries about it. “They monetised it and made it a product,” Jethwa-Odedra said. “It’s been so successful that they’ve had to manage demand by adjusting pricing, which is a great problem to have.”
Tuning into the hospitality ecosystem
The revenue and marketing teams thriving in the current context are the ones remaining agile to the trends that are meaningful to guests, while working more collaboratively between teams.
Technology and AI are addressing some pain points with some brilliant results, although we have to remain vigilant that the solutions hotels implement alleviate issues, rather than aggravate the art of operating hotels.
Ultimately, we’re all part of an ecosystem that can flourish – with the help of innovation, team spirit, and savvy choices.
Listen to the LIVE podcast recording from The Independent Hotel Show London 2025, available on Travel Market Life Podcast through Apple, Spotify and most podcast channels.
Find out more about our forthcoming tour with Travel Market Life for Hotelier Roundtable Discussions, where we’ll have some key conversations with hoteliers about where we are now, and how we can forge a positive path forward.
Ryan Haynes
Director | Lead Consultant
Haynes MarComs Ltd