Categorizing…

"We made a pretty big shift a few years ago when we moved almost all of our media planning analysis - and in some cases buying - in-house, because we needed to be more agile."

ARLINGTON, Va. – The U.S. hotel industry reported positive year-over-year comparisons, according to CoStar ’s latest data through 28 March. CoStar is a leading global provider of online real estate marketplaces, information and analytics in the property markets. 22-28 March 2026 (percentage change from comparable week in 2025): Occupancy: 66.8% (+2.8%) Average daily rate (ADR): US$170.30 (+5.4%) Revenue per available room (RevPAR): US$113.81 (+8.3%) Among the Top 25 Markets, San Francisco reported the largest increases in each of the three key performance metrics: occupancy (+26.5% to 83.6%), ADR (+74.8% to US$339.47) and RevPAR (+121.1% to US$283.76). The market’s performance was helped by the 35 th annual RSA Conference. Denver, which hosted the American Academy of Dermatology Annual Meeting, posted the second largest performance gains: occupancy (+20.2% to 71.1%), ADR (+23.5% to US$158.39) and RevPAR (+48.5% to US$112.56). Overall, 18 of the Top 25 Markets saw a lift in RevPAR. For more information about the company and its products and services, please visit costargroup.com . Additional Performance Data CoStar’s world-leading hotel performance sample comprises 94,000 properties and 12 million rooms around the globe. Members of the media should refer to the contacts listed below for additional data requests.

Most hospitality marketing departments are built for one brand. The default model usually revolves around: one social media manager, one CRM person, one paid ads coordinator, one PR agency. Multiply by the number of brands and you get a headcount projection that most operators in Dubai's F&B market accept without questioning. I have not followed that model. I run marketing for five F&B brands with an internal team of three, supported by a social media agency and a PR agency. Five distinct concepts, each with its own identity, guest profile, and communication calendar, producing weekly content, guest retention campaigns, CRM management, and performance reporting simultaneously. What makes this work is the systems behind it, not the headcount. The Infrastructure The operational stack is five tools: n8n, Make, Claude, Google Sheets, and Microsoft Teams. n8n connects platforms and triggers automated workflows. A guest checkout triggers a guest review sequence. A new campaign brief triggers content production. Competitor pricing changes trigger our monitoring systems. These run without manual input from anyone on the team. Make handles the lighter automations: form submissions, approval routing, repetitive reporting. The kind of low-value work that quietly consumes two or three hours a week per person if left unaddressed. Claude handles content production across all five brands. The critical design decision here was not using Claude as a generic writing tool. We built prompt architectures that encode each brand's voice, guest profile, and tone separately. The output is brand-specific because the input is brand-specific. A simple sheet holds the operational data: campaigns, metrics, guest touchpoints, in a format the team built themselves and can update in real time. No external CRM. No onboarding dependency. Microsoft Teams is where the workflow lives. Not for meetings, but for triggers and async decision-making. When a workflow completes, Teams flags it. When content is ready for review, Teams routes it. The team stays coordinated across brands without constant synchronous communication. What This Model Requires The systems did not appear fully formed. Each one was built on one brand, tested, then extended to the others. The process took months and exposed every weak point in how we were briefing, approving, and distributing content. The most consistent finding: without strong internal SOPs, the automation has nothing reliable to run on. What it required most was a willingness to treat the marketing operation itself as a product to be designed, not just a function to be staffed. The question is not "how many people do we need to do this?" It is "what does the workflow need to look like so that each person can do more of it well?" That shift in framing is the real work. The tools are the output of it. The Operational Result The past 12 months delivered: two new F&B concepts launched from zero to opening day, 18 tailored email campaigns executed across the portfolio, each adapted to a distinct brand voice and guest profile, consistent weekly social output across all five brands. AI has not produced a

For years, hotel leaders have been asking the same question in strategy meetings: “Why are we working harder but growing slower?” The uncomfortable answer is rarely discussed. It’s not your team. It’s not your brand. It’s not even the market. It’s the fact that most hotel revenue strategies were designed for a world that no longer exists and we’re still using them as if demand behaves the same way it did five or ten years ago. That gap is where growth quietly dies. The Market Didn’t Evolve Overnight. It Drifted. Here’s the problem with legacy revenue thinking: it assumes stability. Stable buying cycles. Stable corporate travel patterns. Stable decision-making behavior. Stable seasonality. None of that is true anymore. Demand today is fragmented, impatient, hyper-informed, and emotionally driven. Buyers commit later. They compare faster. They negotiate harder. And they switch brands without remorse. Yet many hotels are still building annual revenue plans using: Last year’s pickup curves Historical segmentation assumptions Static pricing logic Activity-based sales targets Those tools worked— when the market rewarded predictability . Today, the market rewards adaptability . And adaptability is not a buzzword. It’s a leadership discipline. Why “Proven” Strategies Are Becoming Silent Risks One of the most dangerous phrases in hospitality today is: “This has always worked for us.” It sounds responsible. It sounds experienced. It sounds safe. But in a volatile market, familiarity often masks fragility. What worked in a demand-heavy, low-friction environment can actively hurt performance in a market defined by uncertainty, compressed lead times, and buyer skepticism. The biggest risk isn’t changing too fast. It’s changing too slowly while believing you’re still ahead . And that’s exactly what many revenue strategies are doing—optimizing for yesterday while competing in today. The Shift Most Leaders Haven’t Fully Made Yet There’s a quiet but critical shift happening across high-performing hospitality organizations. They are moving from forecast-driven strategy to signal-driven strategy . That distinction matters. Forecast-driven strategy relies on lagging indicators: Occupancy history ADR trends Past segment mix Last year’s pace Signal-driven strategy focuses on leading indicators: Demand elasticity by micro-market Buyer behavior changes across channels Sales conversion friction points Speed of decision-making, not volume of activity One tells you what already happened. The other tells you what’s about to happen. Most hotels are still over-invested in the first—and underprepared for the second. What the Market Is Actually Rewarding Now Across markets, brands, and ownership models, a few patterns are becoming impossible to ignore. High-performing hotels are not winning because they forecast better. They’re winning because they sense faster and respond earlier . They: Adjust commercial focus weekly, not annually Reallocate sales effort based on real-time buyer signals Treat pricing as a strategic lever, not a static number Align sales, revenue, and marketing around demand quality—not just demand quantity This isn’t about complexity. It’s about clarity. And clarity starts with admitting that the old playbook is incomplete. A Simple Framework to Pressure-Test Your Revenue Strategy If you want to know whether your current revenue strategy is built

For years, hospitality has chased a brass ring. One that was universally equated with growth. This was scale. Serving as the industry’s primary measure of success, the metrics had been clear. Growth in hospitality equaled size, flags, brand reach. And scale has advantages - to the businesses and to the guests. Scale can bring more certainty around consistency, expansive loyalty benefits and global reach. This model is successful in many ways. We see it with big brands like McDonalds (originators of scale in many respects), Starbucks… the list goes on and on. As demands for global travel increased, scaling brands have been able to solve some of the key pain points around trust, consistency and distribution. Another truth is that consumer behavior is constantly evolving. And today’s traveler is not the traveler of the ‘80s, the ’90s, or even the 2000s and beyond. Today’s guests are not choosing hotels based on logos alone. As with how spending has shifted from things to experiences, so too are their choices in accommodation. They are choosing the experience. In their activities, in their location and in their choice of hotel. With this shift, owners and guests are now evaluating things like performance, relevance, flexibility. So, does that mean scale doesn’t matter? Not at all. But how scale is built? That’s where it becomes interesting. In fact, what we are seeing across industries is not a rejection of scale, but a more nuanced evolution of it. Scale does not automatically become synonymous with uniformity. It is possible to grow while still feeling local, intentional, and human at the point of experience. Starbucks Let’s revisit the mention of Starbucks. Arguably, one of the most scaled consumer brands in the world, the company has been working hard to refine how that scale shows up when you step into each coffee shop. It’s re-imagination emphasizes neighborhood relevance, varied layouts, local materials, and spaces that feel less standardized and more connected to their surroundings. In short, they are going back to the original intention and feel behind the brand, an independent coffee shop. Behind the scenes, the systems, supply chain, and operational backbone remain highly centralized so what has changed is the customer-facing expression. This is something that the hospitality industry has already realized - especially looking at independent operators. Growth and individuality are no longer mutually exclusive with guests expecting both reliability and character. And not through words or brand promises, but through the property’s design, atmosphere, really the little touches that each property brings to its community and its guests. This doesn’t conflict with the confidence in a well-run operation - it is simply paired with an experience that feels specific to where they are. Properties that feel like a copy/paste may struggle to resonate in the same way in today’s environment. So it’s no surprise that this expectation shift is reshaping how travelers choose where they stay. The property selection fits into the larger experience of the overall destination - whether that be the place

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