Hello,

Last week I participated in a great discussion about AI in hospitality, a webinar hosted by Hyperguest. Lots of great discussions, some times we agreed, sometimes we didn’t. It’s worth a watch. Check it out here. And with that, here’s the weekly newsletter.

Best, Martin

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Those pesky loyalty programs

It is incredible how much money airlines make on loyalty programs. Selling those miles to credits card companies and banks. It is also incredible that people who get these miles for free are then dissatisfied with the complexity of the free-ness. So many French political analogies come to mind. But a few startups are trying to re-think this, I still think it is too complex, somehow I find the Easyjet model is the best, but if it really was – more companies would be doing it. Or is it still too radical? Note: I’m not an airline points collector, the whole travel status thing is beyond me.

Trending

The Rise of Bleisure Travel: A New Era for Hospitality

AIRLINE REWARD PROGRAM STARTUPS

The ‘Content Collapse’ and websites

For some time now, it has been clear that search traffic is and will be waning. While some disagree, I think now is the time to be working on this. Cloudflare’s CEO recently shared some statistics indicating a significant decline in website visits and clicks. Basically the number of time a site is scraped (by bots) vs the visits to the site has worsened dramatically. So we need to get our sites better structured for AI type search. One tip I read, it to make each paragraph a complete and quotable concept. It is time to dust off the SEO contacts and get things optimized again.

CONTENT COLLAPSE CONCEPT

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.  

Ritz-Carlton wins at Cannes

Travel ads, and especially hotel ads aren’t often winners at ad festivals; Superbowl or Cannes. But this one by Ritz-Carlton starring Josh Hutcherson did. It is basically a 4 minute film (with brilliant product placement for their clothing) about how going to a hotel is a relaxing experience – at least I think that is the point. In any case, it is a pleasure to watch and leaves a great impression, which is the main point.

RITZ-CARLTON ADVERTISING AWARD

LVMH’s “not-marketing” billions

Some time ago I shared a video of LVMH CEO saying they don’t do marketing, I argued that marketing was the main thing they did. According to this post they do $9.5B of “not-marketing” every year. Luxury is all about brand building, of course there’s the experience and the product which is the foundation. But over time the thing that gives one pricing power is the brand. Should we convince the accountants that 50% of the marketing budget actually should stay on the balance sheet as brand equity?

LVMH MEDIA AGENCY SHIFT

Behind the scenes of hotel tech innovation

Last week, I commented that the first issue hotels need to fix to innovate is finding the right people. I guess the second issue after that is going to be integrations. This article with Bernard Tan, paints the picture quite clearly. There has got to be a better way, Open APIs was something we campaigned for 10+ years ago when I was at Snapshot, it has since been adopted with most vendors. But it still isn’t smooth.

HOTEL TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION

Google’s AI Voice Search

With LLMs I finally believe using voice to control a computer is coming of age. I’ve noticed with GPT I mostly prompt it with voice now, typing seems so slow (but more precise). Some weeks ago Sergey Brin of Google hadn’t realized how powerful this was as he works in an open office and voice isn’t ideal. That probably changed. Is voice search the way? It could be – I’m not sure what interfaces will be better with voice compared to keyboard. But I think we’re going to finally see quite a shift – let’s keep teaching grammar though.

GOOGLE AI VOICE CHATS

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. 

Opinion

The CMO vs CFO Showdown (Again)

Recently I was reading some McKinsey and Google studies about “the effectiveness of marketing” and CMO/CEO issues. It’s a recurring boardroom drama: CMOs defending budgets while CFOs quietly (or not-so-quietly) ask for cuts. And it’s almost always followed by the same question: “What’s the ROI of marketing anyway?” (Random note: It would be interesting to put a percentage of all brand ads into the balance sheet as brand equity).

Now, there’s a case to be made for both sides. CFOs see marketing as a spend, not an asset. No widgets, no IP, just outflows. CMOs, on the other hand, argue that without brand and awareness, the widgets won’t sell. They’re both right, and both wrong.

The real issue isn’t money. It’s clarity. Too often, CMOs try to be strategists instead of interpreters. Instead of breaking down the CEO’s strategic vision into actionable marketing goals, they try to move up and start suggesting strategic visions and stuff like that. I don’t think that is marketing’s role.

If the CEO says, “We want to be the number two player in the market in five years,” it’s not marketing’s job to rewrite the strategy. It’s marketing’s job to map out the brand-building, lead-generation, and demand-driving work that supports that goal. That includes knowing how many leads sales needs, when they need them, and what kind of brand presence supports that journey.

And yes, it’s absolutely measurable. Lead volume, lead quality, brand awareness, review scores, organic traffic—these aren’t vanity metrics. They’re marketing KPIs. A trusted brand is measurable. An inbound funnel is measurable. Even trust is measurable (just look at referral rates and review volume). Sales has revenue; marketing has reach and conversion.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit: I think many marketers over-focus on big picture strategy and rebrands because those are harder to measure and take years to disprove. They’re great at buying time. But if you land in a company preparing for an IPO, that time doesn’t exist. If you’re building a bootstrapped business, the appetite for rebranding is very different. Context matters. And that context comes from the top, from the founder or CEO. Not from the CMO.

So if you’re looking for more budget as a CMO, show more results. If you’re unsure of what your CMO is doing as a CEO, ensure you have given them a clear vision and objective for the company and ask them to show you how they’ll get there. Crunch the numbers. Do they add up?

It’s easier for everyone to have alignment on these.

• The unlikely story of a small AI company for photographers – Link

• “AI can’t generate sand between your toes” should be a travel ad – Link

• Hospitality Design Trends Benchmark – Link [Partner]

• The Hotel Distribution Tech Chart version 2026 – Link [Partner]

⁺ 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.