How Luxury Hotel Marketing Works: A Job Interview Guide

Hotel digital marketing is not like selling a normal product.

A room is gone if nobody sleeps in it tonight. You cannot sell it tomorrow. A shop can keep stock and sell it next week. A hotel cannot.

The same room also earns different money in different places. If an OTA sells it, they take about 15–20%. If the hotel sells it, the hotel keeps that money.

And the marketer does not set the price. The revenue team does.

So the job is not “sell rooms.” The job is to bring in the right demand, at the lowest cost.

The product: a big luxury city hotel

A small hotel and a big city hotel are not the same job.

Big luxury hotels have big fixed costs. The kitchen, engineering, security and front desk are paid every month, full or empty. So the hotel needs many types of guests at once. Tourists alone leave weekdays empty. Companies alone leave weekends empty. Both drop in bad weather months. The hotel only works when different groups peak at different times.

A big hotel sells much more than rooms. It usually has several restaurants and bars, large ballrooms, meeting rooms, a spa, a pool and gym, shops, a big car park, and often serviced apartments. Each one has its own buyer and its own season. In big hotels with a convention centre, food, drink and events can earn as much as rooms, or more. So a marketer who only reports room bookings is only reporting half the business.

This changes the numbers you use. Room numbers like occupancy, ADR and RevPAR only describe rooms. For the whole hotel you use TRevPAR (all revenue) and GOPPAR (profit). Ballrooms are measured by revenue per square metre. Talking about rooms only makes you sound like a room person. Talking about total revenue and profit makes you sound like you understand the whole business.

The owner and the operator are usually two different companies. A developer owns the building. An international hotel company runs it, therefore they would decide the operations, including the head office, the brand, the website, the booking system, the loyalty programme. Other things are decided at the hotel, like local search, event leads, local partners. Saying “I will rebuild the website” is a common mistake, because you often cannot, as the main website normally belongs to the headquarters. 

Some buildings have more than one brand inside. A luxury hotel, a serviced residence and an apartment hotel can share one site. They share the car park and the location, but they have different guests and different prices. The job is to sell one destination without mixing up the brands.

The hotel decides its business mix. Demand is split into groups: individual guests, company contracts, events, tour operators, long stay. The commercial team decides how much space to give each one. A big cheap group can block higher-paying guests on the same days. Marketing does not make that choice, but marketing brings the demand. So your plan must follow the forecast.

A new hotel takes time. A big hotel usually needs two to three years to reach normal performance. In year one there is little booking history, few reviews, and low brand awareness. Sometimes the ballrooms open before the rooms. So the first job is reviews and local visibility, not fine-tuning. And you should spend first on the business you can win fast: events, company accounts, long stay.

You also have many internal customers. The rooms director, the food and beverage director, the events team and the spa all want support. The budget is fixed. Deciding who gets it, based on contribution and not on politics, is a real part of the job.

Check the tracking before you spend

Most big hotels are part of a chain, and the guest pays on the company website, not the hotel’s own page. Tracking often breaks at that moment.

So before you spend anything, test it. Make a booking yourself. Check that it appears in the data. If it does not work, every campaign is blind.

The tools are simple: web analytics, search console, the ad platforms, and clean UTM tags on every link. The discipline matters more than the tools. Messy naming will waste more time than any dashboard saves.

Two problems are common in hotels:

• The tracking window is too short. Leisure guests book weeks ahead. Event buyers book months ahead. A 30-day window will credit the wrong channel, or nothing at all.
• Many sales close offline. An event enquiry becomes money after a site visit, a proposal and a signature. So you need the sales team to record what happened to each lead. Without that, you can measure cost per enquiry but never cost per booking.

Know what you sell

A hotel is not only rooms. It has rooms, food and drink, meeting and event space, and long-stay apartments.

These are four businesses with four buyers. They should never share one campaign.

Events and long stays usually earn the best margin, and they are direct by nature. Nobody books a 500-person conference on a travel app. So the commission problem only applies to normal room bookings.

Build one funnel per audience

• Rooms compete on search and metasearch against travel websites with much bigger budgets. Aim at brand terms and high-intent terms, not broad ones.
• Events are lead generation with a long cycle. Measure enquiries.
• Long stay targets companies and expat families. The research phase can take months.
• Weddings and parties are a consumer purchase, very visual, mostly in the local language.

Separate budgets. Separate ads. Separate landing pages. Separate goals. If you mix them, the numbers average out and tell you nothing.

The three main audiences

Event and conference buyers

The buyer is not the guest. It is usually someone in HR, purchasing, an assistant, or an event agency. They spend company money and need approval. They are not buying the atmosphere. They are trying not to make a mistake.

They decide slowly, three months to over a year, and often as a group. The steps are enquiry, site visit, proposal, negotiation, contract. Marketing only owns the first step. So the honest goal is qualified enquiries and cost per enquiry.

They search in a simple way: a number of guests, a place, a date. Low volume, but they are ready to buy. Big travel websites do not compete here, so these clicks are cheap. Professional networks are the one place you can reach these people cold, because you can target by job title. Venue directories work like travel websites do for rooms.

Your page must answer their questions before they ask: capacity for each seating layout, floor plans with size and ceiling height, sound and screen equipment, truck access, parking, sample menus, and photos of the room set up for a real event. Put a capacity pack behind a form. The form is the lead. A pack is better than a contact button, because they can share it inside their company.

This business fills weekdays and quiet seasons – exactly when tourists are missing.

Long-stay business guests

These guests come from company transfers, projects and regional roles. The booker is often HR or a relocation agency, using a company housing budget. Stays last one month to a year. So the value is the whole stay, not the nightly rate. One contract can be worth more than dozens of short bookings.

They research differently, because they are choosing a home, not a bed. They care about travel time to the office or factory, international schools, supermarkets, a kitchen, laundry, a gym, space for family, and flexible contracts. They search for monthly prices, districts and apartments, not “hotels”.

You reach them through long-tail search, professional networks, expat community groups in their own language, and direct relationships with companies and relocation agencies. That last one is the most valuable and the least digital. One housing agreement can bring guests for years. So often the goal is to start the conversation, not to get a booking.

This demand does not follow the tourist calendar. It follows company planning and investment. That is why it holds occupancy when everything else drops.

Leisure guests

This is the audience most people imagine, and it is the hardest to win with profit. The guest books for themselves, compares many hotels, and trusts reviews and photos. Most of them discover hotels on travel websites. So a new hotel pays 15–20% for visibility until it has a name.

Booking time depends on where they come from. Long-haul guests often book two to four months ahead. Nearby and local guests book two to six weeks ahead.

General searches like “luxury hotel [city]” are expensive and owned by travel websites and big chains. So the realistic plan is: defend your brand name, compete on metasearch at the moment of choice, and catch the brand searches that travel websites create for you.

Your strongest assets here are simple: a complete business profile with good photos, a strong review score, and a direct offer that wins on extras instead of price.

For a city hotel this demand is seasonal, and can be weak in bad weather months. That is when events and long stays must carry the hotel.

They overlap later

A conference guest can come back on holiday. One long-stay enquiry can become a company account. An event buyer may plan their own wedding. Keeping guest data and a direct line to them turns one booking into a relationship. That relationship is the only thing a travel website cannot take a commission on.

Paid ads

Paid search does the heavy work. Match types decide if it makes money. Use exact and phrase match on high-intent words, strong negative keyword lists, and one campaign per audience. Broad matches with automatic bidding will spend your event budget on people looking for a café.

Metasearch matters for rooms, because that is where you compete with travel websites at the exact moment of booking. Bid to net contribution after commission, not to ROAS.

Paid social splits by audience. Professional networks reach event and HR managers by job title. Consumer platforms reach weddings, parties and leisure, where the photos matter more than the targeting.

Retargeting only works after other channels bring people to your site. It cannot be your whole plan. And you can never retarget a competitor’s visitors – that data does not exist and cannot be bought.

Search and owned channels

You often cannot change a chain website. So your strongest free asset is usually your business profile listing: right categories, full facility details, good photos, reviews, and answers to questions. For a new hotel, local visibility comes much faster than website authority.

Content should follow the audiences – venue guides, event planning help, neighbourhood and long-stay guides – in both the local language and English. Local and international buyers search differently, and often on different search engines. Press, review sites and directories build the trust a new website cannot build alone.

What you really own is small: the business profile, the enquiry form, an email list, and a database of company accounts. Everything else is rented.

Keyword priorities

1. Brand words – cheap, high conversion, low volume. You must own them.
2. High-intent words without your name – venue size searches, long-stay searches. Buyers who have not chosen yet. This is where the budget belongs.
3. General category words – expensive, owned by big players. A slow organic goal.
4. Competitor names – small, tactical, last.

Do all of this in both languages.

Event pages and lead capture

Event enquiries are usually too few for A/B testing. With twenty or thirty leads a month, you are reading noise, not results.

So build a separate page for each event type instead – conference, wedding, year-end party, exhibition. Then improve the form step by step, using screen recordings and feedback from sales.

Budget timing

Spend before the stay date, not during it. If guests book four months ahead, the campaign for December runs in August.

So booking pace and lead time decide your media calendar. This means you cannot write a marketing plan without the revenue forecast.

Keep a base level of ads running all year for whichever audience is buying now, and add bursts for the peaks.

The one number

Net contribution. What is left after commission and ad cost.

Reach, impressions and ROAS are checked along the way. They are not the goal.

Key terms

Mock Interview with Claude

If you’re hired to the job

[Claude in the role]

Thanks for coming in. This position is new, so part of today is us working out what it should be.

Let me start with something basic, because I want to know how you think about our business.

Why isn’t hotel marketing the same as marketing anything else?

And then, you start the first of September. What do you actually do in your first month?

[The responses]

In a hotel, the operation costs are fixed, and the value of the room is perishable (which means that the value expires after every 12 midnight). The marketing job is to ensure the number of rooms are sold with a right ratio. But, customers don’t buy a room, they buy an experience, which means that the hotel room normally comes in with exclusive services. Hence, all the marketing activities have to wear the most luxurious look, I will ensure that.

In my first month being with Ascott, the first thing I will do is to talk to the Regional Marketing team (to be wired into the marketing assets, to set up all the tracking which we need to measure when the budget spent) and to the Revenue (to create a digital marketing plan which fits to the revenue plan). In hotel marketing, OTAs are the fastest way to make revenue, but this is the short run. If we have an owned distribution channel, the cost will decrease over time, which increases the Net contribution. During my first month, since we are not opening rooms yet, my plan in the first month will be to generate revenue (Oct-Dec) from F&B services and ballrooms. It’s the end of the year. Lots of events will happen soon.

Identifying New Leads: Connecting with Hanoi Event Planners

[Claude in the role]

Let’s make this concrete.

There’s a woman — call her Linh — who runs events for a commercial bank here in Hanoi. Every year she organises their year-end party. About six hundred people. She’s also responsible for their annual sales conference in March.

Right now, if you asked her to name venues, she’d say the InterContinental, the Sheraton, maybe the National Convention Center. She has never heard of us.

She starts thinking about March next week.

Where does her first enquiry to us come from — and what turns that enquiry into a proposal on my desk?

[The responses]

Firstly, she loves InterContinental, the Sheraton right? She should search for this topic on the internet. if she searches for it, then we can launch a keyword plan which directly points to her. The keywords might be:

• Top conversion keywords like: top ballrooms for 600 people in Hanoi or best conference in Hanoi or
• Topical keywords: best MICE deals for 600 people.

One of the great things about big corp procedure is that the proposer always needs 3 price quotations, which means that she will have to search for the 3rd one. We just need to get to top 1-3 on Google (ads or SEO, doesn’t matter) in social media sites, once she clicked on us on Google, I can wire in a remarketing campaign, to ensure that she see our ads right after she close Chrome and open Facebook, Tiktok or Instagram.

When she clicks on our ads, she will land on a landing page full of specs (to her interest, most important, to fit 600 people into 1 ballroom. we will present to her the room layout, floor plan, additional services like menu, photos of those rooms, parking slots…)

In the end

Bring in profitable demand for the whole hotel – rooms, events, food and drink, long stay. Grow the share that comes direct. Check the tracking before spending. Treat the audiences as separate businesses. Accept that travel websites fill a new hotel in year one, and win the second search on value, not price. Report on net contribution.