In 2026, here’s the ultimate digital marketing playbook that I think hotels should adopt: The Trust-led Multichannel Growth (TMG) approach. Here’s the breakdown:
1. Trust and authenticity
Over the past decade, hotels have mastered the mechanics of digital channels, from OTAs to metasearch to paid media. Yet the landscape has reached equilibrium. Every channel is crowded. Every dollar is measured. Every campaign is optimized.
And yet, many hotels continue to struggle to grow sustainably. That’s because the real bottleneck isn’t traffic or technology. It’s trust. The next “S” growth curve of hotel marketing has to be supercharged by trust. This TMG approach is based on a simple but powerful principle: when travelers trust your brand, every channel performs better. Trust amplifies conversion, strengthens loyalty, and stabilizes revenue across uncertain market cycles.
As a 10-year SEO professional, I think this is exactly the hotel marketing trend leading into 2026. AI isn’t just evolving SEO into search “everywhere” optimization. It’s reshaping the very paradigm of digital marketing as a whole. For the past 20 years, our logic was simple: ranking = trust. If you ranked high on Google, you were seen as the best. However, the new equation is now: authenticity = trust. That’s why programmatic SEO doesn’t work as it did before. It’s trapped in path dependency: built for algorithms, not humans.
Authenticity means showing who you really are:
- in a multifaceted, multichannel, and proactive way
- living in your texts, images, videos, UGC, and CGC
- with deeper and more emotional storytelling, beyond features and into identity
Whether you’re a hotel or any other business, the goal is the same: build trust and reputation on every channel where your audience lives (“Fish where the fish are” – Charlie Munger). Then, let the guest choose how to reach you “their way,” after having known you as easily and comprehensively as possible.
“Direct-minded” travelers may still check OTAs for verified reviews – they just prefer to “book” direct. Likewise, “OTA-minded” travelers may still visit your website to see who you are – they just prefer to “book” with OTAs. The new world is blended, not binary.
The essence of hotel marketing – and really any business – lies in systems and leverage. You should build a positive flywheel that doesn’t break even when you’re not in the room. It should be simple and intuitive. If it’s too complex, it’s probably wrong.
Naval Ravikant lists 4 levers of growth: labor, capital, code, and media. Hotels often underestimate the media, but it may be the most powerful leverage in 2026. Because, as Naval puts it, the media is permissionless – unlike labor or capital. No one (but yourself) can stop you from using it to get a competitive edge quickly.
2. “Rented” vs owned channels?
As a 10-year SEO, I have to say, it’s a myth that there’s an “unspoken agreement” between Google and publishers: publishers give Google content in return for “clicks” to their websites. It is not the “unspoken agreement” that drives the partnership between publishers and search engines, or operators and distribution channels. It is always the customer behaviors and preferences, period. All other metrics are not unimportant, but secondary. There used to be “clicks” generated, but now they’re shrinking because underneath the consumption paradigms have changed, and the intermediaries are adapting to it.
This is why in 2026, hotels should rethink their strategies to rebalance buying fish from grocery stores (OTAs) vs catching their own fish with more expensive bait. Don’t overthink if it’s a “rented” channel or not. In fact, other than reputation, mindshare, and loyalty (which bring you direct traffic), nothing is really “owned” – not Google organic traffic, not AI citations, certainly not PPC traffic (because it’s “paid”).
Last month, Booking Holdings announced a $457 million writedown on the Kayak brand, citing Google’s push for AI-driven overviews and paid links over organic clicks, which squeezed customer acquisition costs. For the same reason, the brand value of Trivago and Tripadvisor fell to $53M and $36M at year’s end 2024, down from $88M and $43M a year ago. Just because your brand and website are owned does not mean the (organic) traffic is.
Marketers would have a bigger problem if they put the secondary metrics (traffic obsession, data ownership, conversion attribution, etc) ahead of customers.
3. Summary
In sum, my 2026 hotel marketing playbook would be:
A) Social media = TOFU reach + meaningful trust building
Social media informs and inspires travel, and more importantly, it builds brand equity in ways no other channel can do at a similar level. Social wins on most aspects, including content authenticity, targeting precision (interest-based algorithms), reach, quality, and cost effectiveness (CPM)
B) Multichannel distribution (direct + OTA + metasearch) + reviews responding = BOFU reach + improved OTA rankings + efficient acquisition
Review reading is almost always an “in-market” buying signal (especially critical for big group accounts in the RFP season). Review responding is one of the most underestimated content strategies to influence booking decisions at scale. It helps increase your OTA rankings and the hotel’s conversion rates on ALL channels. It’s an efficient yet powerful lever.
C) Let AI do the heavy lifting of content syndication and trust scaling
AI will only amplify the leveraged influence of the TMG approach, thanks to the scaling law, at virtually zero cost to you. For example, more review responses mean a disproportionately higher chance of being cited in AI outputs. This is exactly the concept of the scaling law, which describes predictable nonlinear growth patterns and explains why some systems get much better with size. In AI, performance improvements follow clean scaling laws. This is why “bigger models + more data” work so well for LLMs. Guess how LLM originally got its name?
Laozi said, The way never acts, yet nothing is left undone
. Marketing that tries to force outcomes often burns out. Marketing that aligns with the natural flow of traveler behavior, i.e., meeting them where intent already exists, compounds.
The TMG approach isn’t about chasing attribution. It’s about striking a balance – between short-term performance and long-term brand growth, between pouncing and preserving, and between doing less yet achieving more. When your hotel’s marketing becomes trust-led, growth follows naturally.
About Travel Media Group (TMG)
Travel Media Group (TMG) is a hospitality marketing partner for brands, hotel management groups, and individual properties. Services include custom social media marketing, professional review response, online reputation management, and more. TMG is responsible for elevating our hotel partners’ online presence while helping hotels manage real-time guest feedback. Travel Media Group is a business that is a part of the Dominion Enterprises Family.
