What shifting digital content strategies mean for hotels, marketing teams, and guest engagement
Dec 2, 2025
Generative AI is entering a more practical phase, and the hospitality industry will feel the impact. After years of experimentation, companies are now under pressure to turn their AI investments into measurable value — especially in marketing, guest communication, and personalization. Forrester’s 2026 outlook suggests that hotels will need to rethink how they create, manage, and deploy content across channels. At the same time, trust, transparency, and operational efficiency will become critical differentiators as guest expectations rise and digital platforms evolve.
Key takeaways
- Practical AI adoption becomes essential: Hotels will shift from testing AI tools to implementing solutions that clearly improve marketing efficiency, personalization, and operational communication.
- Prompt-first personalization: Instead of relying on static marketing materials, hotel teams will use modular prompts to generate real-time, personalized content — from email offers to website messages — driven by guest behavior and booking signals.
- Content operations get smarter: Automation will reduce bottlenecks in campaign creation, freeing teams to focus on measuring what content actually drives bookings, conversions, and brand visibility.
- Vendors scale back generic AI agents: Hotel tech providers may rethink large AI agent rollouts as hotels increasingly build or customize their own agentic workflows tailored to their PMS, CRM, and revenue systems.
- New content roles emerge in hotels: As AI-generated content increases, hotels will need specialists who ensure brand consistency, manage multilingual quality, improve taxonomy, and maintain accurate content across OTAs, metasearch, and direct channels.
- Trust becomes a booking factor: As answer engines and AI travel assistants gain traction, platforms will pursue human-verified content sources. Hotels with strong, credible first-party content will have a competitive advantage in these environments.
- Short-form video continues to dominate: Limitations in AI video generation mean long-form, immersive content won’t scale yet. Hotels should expect short, snackable videos to remain the most effective format for discovery and marketing in 2026.
Source: Forrester
