Hotel Bookings Boost

Hey hotelier, When bookings come in soft, what do hotels do?Go find more traffic. Throw out a promo to the OTAs. Yes, you nailed it.Another campaign, searching for a bigger audience, one more channel to sign up for. I admit, that was my instinct too once upon a time. It feels like you're taking action. You're being proactive. But after analyzing hotel booking paths, I see it differently now. The most valuable revenue isn't more people or more traffic in your booking flow; it's already...

Remember the fanny pack?Remember when everyone declared the fanny pack was dead? Too dated. Too dorky. Nobody wants that anymore. Then it came back as a belt bag, and suddenly it was everyone's must-have accessory.Same concept. Completely repositioned. Blogs took the same journey. For years, the conventional wisdom was that blogs were over. Too slow. Too old school. Not worth the effort.Mostly used for excessively long online recipes. (praise for the "jump to recipe" button, right?)Many...

Hotelier, there’s a day coming, maybe it has already happened, when you open your analytics and see it: Organic traffic is down. Not a tiny dip. A real drop. And in about three seconds, your brain starts building the emergency plan: “Do we need more content?” “Do we need more budget?” “Is SEO broken?” “What does this do to bookings?” Then comes the part no one enjoys: the RevOps/Commercial meeting. It's tough to enter a room with a report that says, “Traffic is down.” It feels frustrating to...

We were halfway through our call when the hotelier I was chatting with said:“There’s nothing we can do. OTAs have all the power.” My heart sank a bit. I hear that a lot. I understand why it feels true.Today's Booking Boost, I'm calling that out for what it is. Nothing more than a pervasive 25-year-old myth. But First, Here's How it Started OTAs have been part of hotel life since the late ’90s. Expedia. Booking.com. Easy distribution. Quick volume. For many independent hotels, it has become...

“I'm not afraid of AI. I'm just not exactly sure where to start.” That’s what I’m hearing from hoteliers right now. And that distinction matters.Hoteliers aren't afraid of AI - we love it.You're using AI tools every day, especially LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini.What hoteliers are struggling with is clarity. Not what AI is. But, what does it actually mean for their marketing so their hotel continues to be found and booked? Right now, there’s a lot of noise around AI in hotel marketing. New...

Many hotel websites today still look and behave as they did in 2019. That's SIX years ago. They built them to feel good, look pretty, not to answer anything.Pretty photos. Very little text.Dreamy lines like “Experience luxury reimagined” or “Where memories are made.”Remember those websites? Back then, this kind of website was "good enough."If a guest liked your location, room type, amenities, and price, you were in the running to get booked. And if they had questions, they called the front...

Here’s a confession from my GM days: I used to think being busy meant I was doing my job well. If I were bouncing between fires, answering everyone’s questions, fixing everything… I thought I was being a great leader - available to everyone. But the months I was “busy” were never our highest-performing months. Turns out, reacting is not the same as progressing.As we wrap up 2025, I've been giving a lot of brain time to helping hoteliers set up 2026 for success. The last issue of the Bookings...

It's that time of year when Hoteliers have budget on the brain, marketing and sales plans deadlines, pressure on Black Friday campaigns, and Q4 performance. Add to that a to-do list that never ends. This week's Bookings Boost is inspired by a chat I had with a Hotel GM. They said, “Christine, by 9 a.m. I’ve handled a last-minute rate change, signed off on our Black Friday email, and replied to 10 vendors who say their AI-powered tech will change my life and my hotel. ” Sound familiar? You...

Recently on LinkedIn, I saw a post that shared a message from Marriott’s Aloft Miami Brickell.They were offering guests 3,000 Bonvoy points for completing a survey with a perfect 9 or 10 score. The text even explained how it works: “If you enjoyed your stay, we kindly ask you to select the top score.” I stared at the post, blinking my way through various thoughts. I was puzzled that a brand of this size would play this "Let's Make a Deal" style game. Even if the guest gives the 10 and takes...

Have you ever poured water into a bucket only to have it leak out? Last year, a hotelier from Grand Cayman reached out - frustrated. She’d been trying to fix her website conversion rates for months.Then she asked her high-priced marketing agency to take over.After eight months with the agency, nothing had changed. Traffic was high.As for bookings?Still low. The classic conversion rate issue. Have you ever checked your analytics and thought, “Why aren’t bookings coming through?”You know how...