Marketing & Guest Loyalty

Starting in June 2025, Meta (Facebook) will implement a change in reporting that may affect how advertisers view the performance of Collection Ads using Instant Experiences. This update could decrease the reported Landing Page Views (LPVs), but it’s important to note that this does not indicate a decline in actual performance. Instead, it represents a change in the definition and measurement of LPVs.

Talk to any hotelier about the guest journey, and the same themes tend to emerge: personalisation, seamless booking, loyalty, guest experience. Technology is expected to enhance all these moments. But there’s one step that often gets overlooked and yet it underpins the entire guest relationship: identity verification.

Most hotels rely on OTAs to keep occupancy high, especially in low season. It is a working strategy. But it comes at a price: lost margins, limited control over guest data, and the constant challenge of competing with your own listings.

Summer brings a welcome surge in travel, with millions of people booking hotels, redeeming loyalty rewards, and flocking to vacation destinations. But as transaction volumes rise, so do fraud risks and many hospitality brands find themselves unprepared for the scale, speed, and sophistication of these attacks.

In hospitality, it’s not the lack of effort that slows teams down — it’s the lag between information and action. And all too often, that lag starts with communication that lives outside the flow of work.

The recent PhocusWire article, “Hotels grapple with ‘secondary OTAs’ for pricing control,” highlights a growing concern in the hospitality industry: the rise of non-major OTAs and their impact on rate parity and revenue management.

In the rapidly evolving world of hospitality, a fundamental shift is underway. No longer is a hotel merely a place to rest one’s head; today, it’s a portal to emotion, exploration, and personalized engagement. The traditional benchmarks of luxury—thread count, square footage, and concierge services—are being replaced or complemented by immersive experiences and local storytelling. This new wave of hospitality, known as the "experience-first" approach, is all about designing hotels not just for comfort, but for creating lasting memories.

I’m quite sure that one day someone asked “So… where do we start with this computer thing?” The answer was: anywhere. Some people opened Lotus 1-2-3 some people did graphic design, some wrote a letter. The point wasn’t the starting point, it was the fact we’d started. Generative AI is the same seismic moment, only faster and louder, and the “where do I start?” needs to change to “what’s next”.

Cybersecurity probably isn’t high on your list of passions. But for any hotelier, it should be.

In hospitality, seasonality isn’t just a footnote in the budget—it’s often the main storyline. Whether it’s summer vacationers filling oceanfront suites, fall group travel spiking occupancy, or citywide events creating compression across an entire market, these seasonal surges are what make or break performance.