Direct booking, rate strategy, upselling and loyalty for hotels and hospitality groups.
16 articles
Strategy should turn every stay into recognition, permission, value and a concrete reason to return direct. A guest who checks out unrecognised has no reason to skip the OTA next time.
Architecture should define sources of truth, events, ownership and recovery before choosing connectors. Adding another connector rarely fixes a system that never agreed on which one holds the truth.
Strategy should define the value guests receive in exchange for data, how it is governed and which decisions improve. A loyalty programme that collects data without changing a single decision is just a discount with extra steps.
Architecture should start from journeys and sources of truth, not market labels. Buying a CDP does not resolve a CRM problem, and buying a CRM does not resolve a data-ownership one.
Personalisation should reduce effort and increase relevance at specific journey decisions. Personalising everything at once usually means personalising nothing well.
Strategy should optimise usefulness and margin per stay, not the number of pop-ups. An upsell offered at the wrong moment reads as pressure, not hospitality.
The project should be designed as its own product and operation, not as a link added to the website. Bolting a package deal onto an existing booking flow usually breaks both products at once.
Strategy should optimise price accuracy, deep-link continuity and incremental contribution by hotel. A rate mismatch on metasearch erodes trust faster than any campaign can rebuild it.
The priority is to remove avoidable abandonment and recover genuine intent with context. Not every abandoned booking is lost business; treating them all the same wastes the recovery budget.
Optimisation should simplify the decision and protect offer continuity. A test that lifts conversion by breaking rate parity somewhere else isn't really a win.
The KPI system should connect demand, availability, booking, consumed stay and contribution. A hotel can hit its booking target and still lose money on the stay if the system stops measuring there.
The RFP should buy evidence and fit, not a list of yes answers. Every vendor will answer 'yes' to a feature question; the checklist exists to make them prove it.
