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I've recorded a handful of solo episodes for Hospitality Marketing Lab now. The OTA questions. Why marketing fails to prove ROI. What to actually ask your agency. Every time I finish one, I think the same thing: I want to talk shop with someone who's actually in the industry, not just record myself. So here's an open invitation. Hotel owner, GM, marketer, revenue manager, agency side, doesn't matter what your title is. If you've got real opinions on branding, OTA independence, pricing, or why marketing does or doesn't work, I want to record that conversation. That's the show. If you've got something to say, reply here or DM me. Hospitality Marketing Lab. Biweekly episodes, Link in the Comments 👇 #Resaco #Hospitality #HotelManagement #HotelMarketing #HotelOwner #HotelGM

On a previous episode of Hospitality Marketing Lab, Joni from Flatlight told me that almost every luxury hotel brand he's worked with looks identical once you remove the logo. I think most of us assume a new photographer or a redesigned homepage fixes that, but he made the case that the brand strategy has to exist before a single design decision gets made, or you're just decorating the same generic promise as everyone else. His question is the one I want to ask you: if you covered the name on your homepage right now, could a stranger tell your hotel apart from the one three doors down? #Hospitality #HotelBranding #BoutiqueHotel #Resaco

So Google just confirmed something that I think a lot of people in hospitality aren't fully paying attention to yet. They're testing agentic hotel booking in the US. Meaning someone describes the trip they want, in a conversation, like talking to a person, and books and pays without ever leaving the chat. No search results. No website visits. No booking engine. Just, done. Now here's the thing I find genuinely fascinating about this. We've spent years in hotel marketing talking about direct bookings like they were about one specific thing. The button on your website. The booking engine. The checkout flow. And in a narrow technical sense, yes. That's what direct booking meant. But I think the more honest definition was always something else. Being the option that gets picked. And Google just became a much bigger room where that choice happens. Which leads to the part I can't stop thinking about. Independent hotels who've spent years, and real money, fighting to reduce OTA dependency. Building their websites. Optimising their booking engines. Running Google Hotel Ads. All of it pointed at one goal. Own the relationship with the guest. And now there's a real possibility that the guest books them through Google's AI assistant without ever seeing their website. Which is, depending on how you look at it, either a massive opportunity or a brand new middleman wearing a friendlier face. If a guest can book you without ever seeing your website, does direct still mean anything to you? #Resaco #Hospitality #AgenticAI #DirectBooking #HotelMarketing #GoogleAI #HotelOwner #HospitalityMarketing

Do you know exactly what you paid booking.com last year? Not roughly but the real number. OTA commissions are built to stay invisible. They're spread across thousands of small transactions instead of one line on an invoice. In the latest episode of Hospitality Marketing Lab, Daniel breaks down the full cost of OTA dependency for a boutique hotel, past the headline rate to the number most owners never add up. We cover: — Why OTA commissions are designed to stay hidden until you go looking for them — Why booking.com keeps the guest relationship after checkout, not you — The hidden reason you may be paying twice for a guest who already searched for your hotel by name — What happens to your bottom line when OTA dependency drops by just 20 percentage points Watch the full episode on YouTube or Spotify. Link in the comments.

Most hotel owners I talk to think their marketing is fine. The campaigns are running. The reports are coming in. The meetings are happening. And yet direct bookings are flat. OTA dependency keeps creeping up. And every month there's another commission invoice that's a little harder to justify. The problem usually isn't effort. Everybody's trying. The problem is that most owners have never been shown what good actually looks like. So they can't tell the difference between an agency that's working and an agency that's just looking busy. Those are very different things. I made a video about this. Seven questions. Each one gives you a genuine signal in about 30 seconds whether the person sitting across from you understands hospitality, or just understands marketing. Because those are not the same thing. And the gap between the two is where most hotel marketing budgets quietly disappear. Comment "7" and I'll share the link right away #HotelMarketing #DirectBooking #HotelOwner #Hospitality #HospitalityLeadership #BoutiqueHotel #Resaco #DigitalMarketing

Your agency's reports look great, but your direct bookings stay flat. In the latest episode of Hospitality Marketing Lab, Daniel Laurean shares 7 questions every hotel owner should be asking their marketing agency — and what the answers actually reveal. We cover: - Why a report full of impressions is a red flag, not a result - The OTA philosophy question that separates real agencies from busy ones - Why hotels that win know their numbers down to the cent - What "guests vs. leads" reveals about how an agency actually thinks - The one question most hotel owners never think to ask Available now on YouTube and Spotify. 🎙️ Links in the comments.