The hotel industry sits on a goldmine and leaves most of it completely untouched. In a world where every other major consumer sector has figured out how to monetize attention, personalize experiences, and capture wallet share across the full customer lifecycle, hotels are still largely selling rooms like it’s 1999.
Despite commanding a physical footprint in basically every market, operating around-the-clock service infrastructure, and interacting with one of the highest-intent customer profiles in the world (travelers!), hotels remain the most commercially unleveraged industry on the planet. The worst part? It’s largely a mindset problem.
Revenue Without Leverage
In hospitality, we obsess over RevPAR (revenue per available room, but you already knew that) as the holy grail metric. But that metric was built for a world where hotel commerce stopped at the reservation. Today’s most valuable companies don’t just measure revenue per unit. They maximize revenue per user, per transaction, per interaction. Airlines have known this for decades. Amazon lives and dies by it.
Hotels, by contrast, operate in disconnected silos. The booking engine doesn’t talk to the PMS. The spa doesn’t know the guest’s loyalty tier. The email marketing tool can’t transact natively. The guest’s experience is fractured, and so is the commercial opportunity.
Meanwhile, the OTAs–despite not owning a single property–have captured the demand layer by building real commercial infrastructure: merchandising, bundling, payments, segmentation, loyalty, and lifecycle monetization. Hotels handed over that opportunity in exchange for short-term visibility and long-term dependency.
Tech Isn’t the Problem. The Funnel Is.
Every hotel has a tech stack, but few have a commerce stack. Most hotel websites convert around 1%. Not because of poor marketing, but because they aren’t built to convert. They’re built to inform. To act as digital brochures. We have treated the booking engine like a widget instead of the transaction core.
Ask yourself: What happens after a guest books a room? In most cases, absolutely nothing. No personalized upsell. No experiential cross-sell. No curated itinerary. No automated re-engagement loop. No reason for them to book direct again. The commerce funnel begins and ends at the room reservation. We’re leaving money on the nightstand.
Hotels as Platforms, Not Products.
The most valuable companies in the world think like platforms. They capture demand, orchestrate transactions, personalize the journey, and keep customers inside an ecosystem.
Hotels have the real-world infrastructure to do this: restaurants, bars, spas, gyms, retail, events, and concierge services. But they’ve lacked the digital rails to turn that infrastructure into a connected guest experience.
We need to start thinking in revenue per guest (RevPG?). Not just in-room spend or minibar revenue, but the total lifetime value of that traveler across every visit, every transaction, every recommendation. This shift from static rooms to dynamic relationships is where the leverage lives.
The Industry’s Leapfrog Moment
Here’s the good news: the leapfrog moment is here.
A new generation of infrastructure: AI-native, guest-first, and commerce-enabled, is emerging. One that replaces clunky middleware with invisible intelligence. One that turns every guest touchpoint into a monetizable opportunity. One that gives hotels back control of their own demand. But technology alone won’t save us. What we need is a shift in posture.
We must stop thinking like operators of fixed assets and start acting like orchestrators of fluid commerce ecosystems. The future of hospitality is guest lifetime value not “heads in beds”.
Conclusion: Reclaiming the Demand Layer
The industry has been commercially unleveraged for too long. But it won’t stay that way. The next decade will see a reordering of power in hospitality, away from intermediaries and toward innovators. Hotels that embrace this shift will unlock new business models, new monetization opportunities, and new forms of guest loyalty. Those who don’t will become increasingly commoditized.
The question is simple: Will you reimagine what hospitality can be, or settle for how it’s always been?
It’s time to build the commercial engine hospitality has always deserved.
