How to turn any meeting into a blood-bath – ask for focus and demand that they list the items they’ll stop doing. Good luck. Other news, OTA marketing spend grew. Amazon trying a strange new model…
Hello,
ITB was a blast, the show is filling up again and that was great. Hotel brands aren’t very present anymore but hotel tech is growing a lot. So many things to see it is hard to keep up. And great to catch up with so many of hotel tech’s pioneers. If you’re hesitant about trade shows – go there to meet vendors and have the discussions that you can’t have on a call.
Best, Martin
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OTAs increasing marketing budgets
All the major OTAs put together are spending $17.8b in marketing a year. It increased by 5% last year. Booking and Expedia are the biggest players Airbnb and Trip come after them. For Booking their marketing spend is 31% of their revenue (so if you’re complaining about high costs of OTA bookings – realize that up to 31% they wont even flinch). Understanding the dynamics of marketing on the biggest players is quite interesting source of data, that might inspire ideas.
OTA MARKETING SPEND
Podcasting is huge
I listen to podcasts, I don’t listen to a lot of industry podcasts but I listen to others. As you can see in the newsletter, I try to get inspired from the outside the industry. But I think there are millions of people who would love to hear what hotel life is all about. The behind the scenes stories. Would love to see some great hoteliers talking on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Can it happen?
YOUTUBE PODCAST GROWTH
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry. Brand research with AI
There’s a fun use-case for AI, especially X-AI or Grok which is constantly trained on the latest news, reactions and user content, to survey it about your brand. Test reaction probabilities to messaging and brand narratives. While it remains an AI, due to the training data – it might have some interesting insights.
AI BRAND MARKETING
Travel Agents are hospitality
The self-service booking model that the world has come to embrace is practical, but it isn’t excellent hospitality. The idea of “don’t worry, we’ve got everything prepared” isn’t really available in the online world, where it is more an idea of “it was written in the T&Cs”. There’s a good reason for a come-back. And AI could take off the heavy lifting. Leaving qualified people to just do the closing.
TRAVEL AGENTS THRIVING
Amazon’s New Feature: A Model for Hotel Direct Bookings?
Amazon is testing a feature that directs shoppers to brands’ websites when products are not available on Amazon. So many questions on this. But what if OTAs tried it? Could this be inspiration for a better relationship between OTAs and hotels? The approach aligns with the customer-centric philosophy and could be a game-changer for brand visibility and sales. But it also has so many chances of being abused.
AMAZON DIRECT BOOKINGS
Alexa+ finally AI?
Amazon’s introduction of Alexa+ marks a significant advancement in AI-powered virtual assistants. The key aspect of Alexa+ is its generative AI. It could be the change that voice assistants need, but running them will be expensive and how much accurate will the results be. Will people get used to voice prompting with more context than “play some music” or “tell me the weather”? I guess in the world of generative AI, context is king.
VOICE ASSISTANT EVOLUTION
Podcast: I was invited on the Hospitality Daily Podcast and spoke about technology in hospitality, some thoughts on what wont change in hospitality, and why I co-founded 10minutes.news. Best, Martin
Opinion
Focus isn’t about adding—it’s about cutting.
One of the most overlooked skills in getting a project over the finish line is not listing everything that needs to be done but deciding what will not get done. It’s easy to make an endless to-do list and allocate more resources in the hope that everything will magically fall into place. It rarely does.
I’ve been in countless meetings where teams discuss priorities. The bigger the team, the harder it is. Everyone has their pet projects, their own ‘critical’ tasks that somehow didn’t make the official list—or worse, they did, even though they shouldn’t have. The usual response? ‘We need more resources to get it done.’ But that’s not focus. That’s dilution.
The key to true execution is subtraction, not addition.
Steve Jobs put it best: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
Yet, when it’s time to ‘focus,’ most teams agree on what’s important but fail to define what they’ll stop doing. That’s where things get real. When you start listing what you’ll actively kill, projects start moving, and products start shipping.
I won’t sugarcoat it: these meetings are brutal. People don’t like letting go of their projects. There’s blame, frustration, and occasional drama. But in the end, the best-run teams make the hard cuts. They identify what truly matters and clear the path to execution. Corners will be cut, you need to select which ones they will be.
So next time your team talks about ‘focusing,’ don’t just ask what needs to be done—ask what needs to be stopped. That’s when you’ll find real clarity.
This isn’t a popular opinion (try it and you’ll see), but it is effective.
