Hello,

The hotel brands of the world infographic project I’ve been working finally completed. Super happy to get it finally published. Now I’m surprised that this didn’t exist before. It’s free, no sign-up required. More on that below, enjoy the newsletter.

Best, Martin

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Non-revolutionizing AI tips for hotels

The main thing I insist on with GenAI is that people should start using it daily. It sounds useless as a tip, it is harder than it seems. There is so much that can be done, but there is also so much hype. So many useless tips. So many “experts” (who mostly spend their time asking AI what to say). The thing is the tech is so broad, could potentially do so much, but the only way to find out what it can do is to start using it daily. It doesn’t matter what you do, just do something. Here are some simple tips from a hotel ops person. They wont change everything, but they’ll give you a little more productivity and precision.

Trending

eDreams ODIGEO strengthens its Board of…

THINGS TO DO TODAY

Starbucks pulling back from digital

Starbucks and hospitality have something in common. It is about the experience. There are plenty of places selling coffee, and plenty of places to sleep, but how is your experience. It seems Starbucks has realized they have put too much focus on the digital experience and not enough on the physical one (I tend to agree). Is this a warning for hotels? Should we redirect the digital spend towards making it less digital and more human? For example can we stop having the front desk stuck behind screens soon?

PHYSICAL SPACES

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.  

Retail advertising trends

HoldCos (P&G, Unilever etc) have less influence on the advertising landscape than they used to, and agencies are loosing ground too. It seems more and more retailers are managing their advertising directly. I often compare the travel/hospitality industry to retail. In many ways travel is about 10+ years ahead in terms of online shift. But as the stakes are so much higher in the retail industry, it tends to evolve with much more solid tech rails and systems. They can’t afford the same inefficiencies as we have in travel (we’re still doing website + booking engines, just let that sink in). Retail’s smaller but more frequent purchase cycle means efficiency is key.

SHIFTING AD SPENDERS

No need to fly by Ogilvy

Following the post of some weeks ago about tourism destinations that need to be better distributed. This campaign from Ogilvy for DB really does a good job. Selling the local stay and places. Maybe there are more ideas like this. Not necessarily about not traveling but about the beauty of places that aren’t on people’s radars because nobody really did a great job of talking about them.

DEUTSCHE BAHN

Is the AI hype over?

There has been a lot of talk about the AI hype cycle being over. I believe the hype is very much related to VC and funding, where so much capital was being put into AI that it should spark some caution. Consider that the biggest cost in building an AI data center is for chips, and those chips are consumables that need replacing every few years, it isn’t like pulling cables. The tech of generative AI is still amazing, so now that the hype seems to be settling a bit – maybe we can focus on making it more productive.

AI LIMITATIONS RESEARCH

Soho house

I’ve spent quite some time studying membership systems for hotels. It isn’t a super easy problem to solve, membership clubs like Soho house have managed to solve it on a niche level basis. But the problem is scale. Hotel chains focus on their loyalty programs but they’re not membership programs like Amazon or Easyjet have. They buy your “loyalty”, whereas clubs sell you the loyalty. Taking Soho private is a good move. It was weird that a private club would become a public company.

SOHO HOUSE BRAND STRATEGY

Overly pragmatic

I pride myself with being pragmatic in my marketing strategies and work. But I realize there is something such as overly pragmatic. Marketing requires some form of illogical creativeness. Not everything can be boiled down to putting a call to action on a poster or a banner. And this critique of the iconic “Think Small” ad is a brilliant testimony to the fact that cleverness can work, and being overly pragmatic will make everything boring in the end.

IMPROVING AN ICON

Podcast: I was invited to talk about AI in hospitality on this podcast, along with many other great industry thought leaders. A great discussion, we didn't agree on everything. Which made it more interesting.  

Opinion

The Great Hotel Brand Wheel

About a year ago, I shared the Hotel Brand Pyramid (you might remember it from edition 87) a chart I had picked up at a seminar. It turned out to be both old and incomplete, and the feedback came in fast: wrong brands, missing brands, and far too simplistic for today’s hotel landscape. Fair enough. So, together with the 10minutes.news team, we set out to make the definitive version: The Hotel Brands of the World infographic.

This was not an AI project. In fact, AI was spectacularly useless for this task. Every attempt produced glaring errors, invented brands, misfiled under the wrong holding companies, or simply shuffled into random categories. After a few rounds of testing, we realized the only way forward was the old-fashioned way: manual research, collecting logos one by one (this is super painful), and placing them into a coherent system. More than 100 hours later, we had something that didn’t just look like a logo salad but an actual map of the global hotel brand ecosystem.

Here are some of the discoveries that surprised me:

• Special hotels dominate. The largest number of brands isn’t in economy or “mainstream”, it’s the high end of the market. Luxury, Premium, Boutique and Upscale accounts for 66% of all hotel brands. Midscale and Economy only has 33%. So much for the “pyramid” metaphor. The market is actually top-heavy.

• Accor loves brands. With 44 brands, Accor takes the crown for most brand names (though not the largest group by size). Marriott follows with 35, Hyatt with 26.

• Independence still matter. Out of 378 brands, 69 are independent (single brand or small group), and in luxury they punch hardest: 25 of the 73 brands are not tied to a major group.

• Category quirks. Marriott dominates premium and extended stay, while Accor leads in economy. But it’s the independents who top the luxury field.

When you step back, the bigger picture is clear: hotel branding isn’t a tidy hierarchy but a massive series of brands, shaped as much by investor appetite as by consumer recognition. For the big brands the more the merrier, their main focus is to get you into their rewards program. So while the pyramid has a lot of meaning and hierarchy matters, it doesn’t work for the number of brands. I’d need to verify how it works in number of hotels or number of rooms.

My main takeaway here is that there is room for more brands and more stories. The problem is the brand isn’t really the right terminology. In the hotel industry they are much more transitory than in consumer goods. Consistency is so much harder with a global hotel brand.

If we missed any important brands, leave a comment with the name, the number of hotels, if independent or not and the category.

• Could Gary Oldman Be Delaying Retirement? – Link

• Creators are becoming studios – Link

• Influence Society Design & Tech Benchmark Q3 2025 – Link⁺

⁺ Note, articles that are published by companies or people I work with are tagged with the ⁺ symbol or Partner word. I’m adding this as a transparency. Previously I avoiding sharing content from partners to remain objective, but sometimes they have excellent articles that deserves being shared so to remain transparent, I’ll tag them.