Blog Stories

Cyber Week is approaching, and hotel marketers are entering the final stretch of campaign preparation. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Travel Tuesday offer opportunities to generate bookings, reconnect with past guests, and build demand for future stays. But campaign performance depends on more than an attractive offer and a scheduled email. This final Cyber Week hotel marketing checklist covers the essential work that should happen before the first promotional email goes out

Getting a hotel marketing budget approved takes more than presenting a list of campaigns and estimated expenses. Owners and asset managers want to understand how marketing investments contribute to revenue, support occupancy goals, and improve profitability. This article explains how hotel marketers can use guest data, historical performance, revenue attribution, and ROI reporting to build a stronger business case for their marketing budgets. It also covers how to identify op

Your hotel's marketing team can develop the best campaigns, invest in sophisticated CRM technology, and create personalized guest journeys. But the success of those efforts often depends on something much simpler: the information collected when a guest checks in. Accurate hotel guest data collection helps properties recognize returning guests, improve segmentation, deliver relevant communications, and build stronger relationships after checkout. Incomplete records, outdated c

Holiday marketing often focuses on room promotions, but hotels have other opportunities to generate revenue. Gift cards, dining, spa services, local experiences, meeting space, and extended stays can all contribute to seasonal revenue. With targeted email marketing and automated guest journeys, hotels can promote these offerings to past guests, local residents, and upcoming arrivals. HMA Intelligent Marketing helps properties use guest data and segmentation to identify the ri

Managing marketing across a hotel portfolio creates an interesting challenge. Corporate teams need consistency, visibility, and efficiency, while individual properties still need the flexibility to market around their own demand patterns, guest mix, geography, events, and revenue goals. Effective multi-property hotel marketing campaigns require a structure that connects portfolio-wide planning with property-level execution. That includes a shared marketing calendar, clear bra

A Cyber Week promotion should be a campaign, not a single email competing for attention on Black Friday morning. A well-planned Cyber Week hotel marketing strategy can begin before the offer launches and continue after the sale ends. Teaser campaigns build awareness. VIP early access gives valuable guests a reason to pay attention. Launch emails introduce the offer. Reminders and urgency messaging keep the campaign moving. Post-sale analysis and follow-up help hotels turn cam

A hotel marketing calendar should do more than organize email sends, promotions, social campaigns, and seasonal offers. It should help the property generate demand when demand is needed, support revenue management goals, and make better use of the guest data already sitting in the CRM and PMS. Building an effective hotel marketing calendar starts with understanding the property's occupancy patterns, booking behavior, local demand drivers, historical guest activity, and period

Hotel holiday marketing starts well before Black Friday. Learn how to build your 2026 strategy around the right offer, guest segmentation, booking flexibility, early-access campaigns and a timeline that prepares your property to compete through Cyber Monday and Travel Tuesday.

The U.S. economy is still growing, but growth has slowed and consumers remain concerned about purchasing power, employment, and everyday costs. Travel demand has not disappeared. Travelers are adjusting how they plan, where they go, how long they stay, and what convinces them to book. For hotels, the 2026 fall travel trends will likely favor domestic trips, shorter getaways, shoulder-season value, flexible booking options, and offers targeted to specific guest interests. Blac

Hotel websites bring in valuable traffic every day. Potential guests browse rooms, compare dates, check rates, start reservations, and, very often, leave before they book. That abandoned booking activity has immense value. That value is lost if your booking recovery program isn't working or is non-existent. HMA’s Boomerang hotel booking recovery helps hotels reconnect with travelers who start the booking process but do not finish. Boomerang identifies abandoned bookings in re

Mid-year is the right time to clean up your hotel CRM before fall planning, holiday campaigns, and budget conversations begin.

Hotel CRM marketing gets weaker when every campaign, automation, and audience decision is treated like a neutral choice. It isn't. The choices your team makes about data quality, segmentation, send volume, and automation relevance directly affect revenue, guest engagement, deliverability, and the long-term value of your database. In the spirit of the “5 Hills We’re Willing to Die On” trend, here is HMA’s version for hotel marketers, resort teams, and property management group

Repeat guest identification should not live in a report that someone may or may not open. It should show up where it matters. At the front desk. In housekeeping. With room service. In the morning operations meeting. In the hands of the people responsible for making the guest experience feel personal, polished, and prepared. That is where HMA’s Valet VIP program comes in. Valet helps hotel teams identify repeat guests, high-value guests, and VIP arrivals before they reach the

Hotels collect large volumes of guest data, but most teams still treat their audience as one group. That approach limits relevance, weakens engagement, and leaves revenue on the table. When you define clear guest ICPs and map tailored journeys to each one, your marketing starts to reflect how guests actually travel, book, and experience your property. That shift improves conversion, strengthens loyalty, and creates a more consistent guest experience from the first interaction

When multiple properties target the same guest with the same message, you create internal competition that reduces engagement, lowers revenue per send, and weakens your overall brand performance. Hotel management companies often operate multiple properties within the same market, targeting similar guest profiles. Without coordination, those properties end up sending overlapping campaigns to the same audience at the same time. That creates unnecessary competition inside the i

Smarter targeting drives engagement, deliverability, and direct bookings without sending more emails. Many hotels still believe revenue growth requires sending more emails. Often, it requires sending fewer, but smarter. If your idea of “CRM strategy” is still batch and blast to the entire database, you are working harder, paying more, and getting less than you should. Why “Batch and Blast” Is Quietly Taxing Your Revenue The old playbook was simple: send every campaign to eve

Summer’s coming fast, and the forecast isn’t exactly smooth sailing. Demand’s here, but it’s shifting in all kinds of ways. Airfares are jumping, booking windows are shrinking, and flexibility is the new must-have. The next two months really matter. What you do now will set the tone (and the revenue) for your summer season. Let’s take a look at what’s actually happening - and what you can do about it. STR Snapshot: Growth Is There, But It’s Uneven The national travel trend nu

Email hygiene for hotels is not optional maintenance. It is the ongoing process of removing invalid, risky, and unengaged email addresses that quietly damage inbox placement and direct booking revenue. Most CRMs and PMS platforms do not detect these threats. Clean data protects margin.

Email marketing still does more work for hotels than nearly any other channel. It reaches past algorithms, keeps the relationship direct, and turns anonymous browsing into booked revenue.

How clean data and direct communication help hotels stay visible, protect bookings, and reduce commission exposure in the age of AI search. AI search is changing how travelers discover and book hotels. Many AI summaries rely on structured data from large OTAs, especially Booking.com , and frequently route travelers to third-party booking pages. Even when a hotel appears in an AI summary, the booking path often leads to an OTA, forcing the hotel to pay a commission and lose fi