Hotel marketing statistics: which ones can you trust, and where they come from

You can trust a statistic when you can say who measured it, on how many hotels and in which year. On 8 October 2026 we took ten figures that come up whenever hotel people talk about budgets, the cost of acquiring a guest, the commission of OTAs (booking portals such as Booking.com) and artificial intelligence. For each one we opened the page that is usually cited and followed its reference, link by link, to the document of whoever did the measuring.

Four hold as they are quoted, each with a limit worth knowing. Two have been overtaken by a newer figure from the same source. One carries the wrong year. Three have no measurement behind them: one is an assertion, one a piece of advice and one a range.

Nearly all the cost measurements are American. We did not find an acquisition cost measured on a public sample of European hotels.

American hotels with their own sales staff spend 9.2% of total revenue on the sales and marketing department: that is the most recent measurement with a sample we found, it is CBRE’s and it describes 2019. The figure that travels furthest is a different one, and it has no source.

The line is “hotels spend less than 2.5% of room revenue on marketing”. Room revenue is the sale of rooms alone, without the restaurant, the spa or events. We followed it backwards. In the introduction to a Hospitality Net panel of 11 August 2025 it is followed by three letters in brackets, STR, the name of the company that collects performance data from hotels. There is no report title, no year and no link. The same author had written it in an opinion piece of 4 November 2024, with no source at all, and before that in an article of 22 July 2021 in Boston University’s hospitality review. There STR is cited one paragraph earlier, for another figure: the 51.5% cut in marketing spending in 2020.

On 8 October 2026 we looked for an STR publication carrying the 2.5% and did not find one. If such a figure exists, STR holds it: collecting hotels’ profit and loss data is its business.

A measurement does exist, and it says something else. CBRE examined the accounts of 4,028 American hotels with on-site sales staff, 214 rooms on average. In 2019 the sales and marketing department came to 9.2% of total revenue. Nearly half of it, 48.8%, was franchise fees: what the hotel pays its chain for the brand and its programmes. Salaries and benefits were 28.5%.

Everything else, from advertising to the website, is left with 22.7% of the department: about 2.1% of total revenue. That last sum is ours, on CBRE’s numbers. The spending a director actually decides is a small part of the line the accounts call marketing.

Gartner’s 8.4% is a real figure, it dates from 2024 and it describes 37 travel and hospitality companies in a survey of large businesses: it tells a single hotel very little. A benchmark is a value to compare yourself with, and this one compares companies of another size.

Every year Gartner asks marketing chiefs what share of revenue goes to marketing. In its public data sheet for 2025, travel and hospitality stands at 8.4% in 2024 and 6.7% in 2025, across 37 companies. In 2025 only two of the sheet’s ten sectors spend less. Further back, MarTech reported from the 2022 survey 5.4% for 2021 and 8.4% for 2022.

Anyone quoting 8.4% today is quoting the top of a series that moved between 5.4% and 8.4% in five years. The release for the 2024 survey says who answers: 395 marketing leaders in North America and northern and western Europe, most of them at companies reporting median annual revenue above $5.3 billion. No single hotel turns over $5 billion: the answers come from groups, and Gartner’s public pages do not list the 37 companies.

One set of accounts shows what a large intermediary in the sector can spend. In its 2024 results release Expedia Group reports $13,691 million of revenue and, adding its two selling and marketing lines, $7,627 million of spending: 55.7%. The panel quoted above gives the same spending as 54% of 2024 revenue, $6.9 billion. In the release, $6,863 million and 53.5% are the figures for 2023.

Nobody has measured how much a hotel should spend on marketing: the percentages in the guides, 4–8% or 5–10% of revenue, are advice. One panel is enough to see it.

That makes three different averages for the same spending, plus the 2.5% in the introduction. A fourth expert on the same panel starts from the right question: before discussing percentages you have to settle what the word marketing covers, and whether advertising on booking portals and price-comparison sites belongs in it.

A number of your own is worth more than someone else’s average. Add up what you pay in a year to bring guests to the hotel: commissions, advertising, sales salaries, chain fees. Divide by what the guests paid. That is the measure in the next chapter, and you can do it with the accounts you already have.

Acquiring a guest costs an American hotel between 20% and 30% of what the guest pays. Kalibri Labs, the company that built this measure, says so in an article of 21 January 2026: it is the second-largest cost after labour, which takes 30–35% of revenue.

The figure you read more often, 15–25%, has the same origin and is ten years old. It comes from a study published by the HSMAI Foundation in 2016, on 25,000 US hotels, with data from 2014 to 2016. The full report does the sum for the whole country: in the twelve months to June 2016 guests paid nearly $147 billion for hotel rooms. Of that, $23.6 billion went on acquisition costs, and $3.5 billion never appeared on a hotel’s profit and loss statement.

How does a cost fail to appear? One of the study’s authors explained it to Today’s Hotelier in December 2025. When a room sells on Expedia for $100, the portal may pass $85 to the hotel and keep $15. The hotel never pays an invoice for that $15 and never sees it in its accounts, yet the room cost it $15.

The accounts keep these costs apart as well. The hotel industry’s standard chart of accounts, known as USALI, has no line for acquisition cost, as an article from the EHL school points out. In the guidelines STR uses to collect profit and loss data, travel agent commissions sit among the costs of the rooms department. Salaries, brand fees and loyalty programmes sit in sales and marketing. The official answers from HFTP, which publishes USALI, confirm it for commissions on group business: they never go into sales and marketing.

The measure has three limits. It covers the United States. It is calculated on what the guest pays, a wider base than the revenue the hotel collects. And in the 2016 study the sales and marketing part was not counted hotel by hotel: the authors applied an average, just under 8% of collected revenue, taken from a comparison with CBRE’s data.

OTA commission, the cut taken by booking portals such as Booking.com and Expedia, has no public average: those who measured it published it as a band. The 15–25% you read everywhere is a plausible range with no sample behind it.

Booking.com, on its help page for properties read on 8 October 2026, defines commission as a set percentage of the total booking amount and does not say what the percentage is. It says the rate varies by country and property type, that yours is in your contract, and that it rises if you join visibility programmes such as Preferred Partner.

The firmest measurement we found is the market study carried out for the European Commission, published in 2022: 300 hotels interviewed by telephone in 6 countries, Spain, Austria and Sweden among them. Independent hotels gave the basic commission rate on 474 contracts with OTAs. The average is published only as a band, between 10% and 20%, and more than two thirds of the contracts fall inside it. Of 285 independent hotels, 56 pay a higher commission at least some of the time in return for services such as greater visibility. The same study lists the estimates in circulation: from the 15–20% of research commissioned by Booking.com up to 10–30%.

The comparison that matters is with the cost of the direct channel, and here too it depends on who measures. D-EDGE, which sells technology for direct sales, examined 1,221 of its client hotels in Europe and Asia. In 2023 a direct booking won by an advert cost on average 7.1% of its value, against 8.1% in 2019: advertising, connectivity costs and campaign management added together. The best quarter of hotels is at 5.2%, the worst quarter at 14.5%. It holds for those hotels and for that part of their bookings: salaries, the website and brand fees are left out.

In Europe in 2025, 51.3% of overnights were booked direct and 29.9% through OTAs. The figures come from the study by HOTREC, the European association of hotels and restaurants, published on 15 September 2026 with HES-SO Valais-Wallis.

Of the statistics we followed, this one has the clearest method. It draws on 2,713 hotels: 1,882 answered a questionnaire in 28 countries between February and May 2026, and 831 are chain properties with aggregated data. It has been repeated every two years since 2013, when OTAs stood at 19.7%. Italy has the highest direct share: in the full report, across 539 Italian hotels, 64.1% of overnights are direct and 21.1% come through OTAs.

“Direct” mostly means the telephone and email. Live booking on the hotel’s own website accounts for 13.9% of overnights; in 2013 it was 7.4%.

The same study has a figure on prices: 51% of hotels say OTAs sell below their rates, often or occasionally, against 43% in 2023. Between 21 September and 8 October 2026 we collected 156 Google Hotels readings in which the price of the hotel’s own site stood beside those of the other sellers, for 68 hotels and resorts in 9 countries. In 117 of them another seller showed a lower price; where it was lower, the median gap was 13.2%. The lowest price is not checked for room, breakfast or refund terms: the readings show what a searcher sees, and they do not prove a breach of contract. The rest is in our guide to hotel rate parity.

In Europe about one hotel in four uses artificial intelligence, 26%; among hotel chains the share that say they do is 91%. The two figures came out two weeks apart, in September and October 2026, and the difference lies in who answered.

The 26% is HOTREC’s: in its sample the median hotel has 39 rooms and 74% of hotels are independent. A further 59% do not use AI and 15% plan to adopt it. The 91% is from h2c, a German consultancy: 122 responses from 113 chains, with 73 properties each on average. The year before, across 171 chains, the share was 78%, in a study backed by 15 sponsors, all technology suppliers.

What counts as using AI matters too. In the 2025 study the most common use was the chatbot, named by 42% of chains. In the 2026 study 60% of reported use runs through outside tools such as ChatGPT, and only 13% of chains report a measurable financial return. So the 91% includes the chain where one office uses ChatGPT for its daily work.

Of those chains, 70% expect more direct bookings from AI-driven channels, ChatGPT and Gemini among them. What those assistants answer today when someone looks for a hotel is what we measured in our study of 3,288 answers from ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini; how to be among them is in the guide on how to get your hotel on ChatGPT and Gemini.

Our own figures should be read by the same rule: we did the measuring, on public data, and each has its sample and its day.

On 12 August 2026 we looked at the websites of 669 hotels with a domain of their own, drawn from four world rankings: 340 had no articles section, and among the 153 with a live blog the median was 9 articles a year. When we rechecked 71 of the sites with no articles, 6 did have a section: the 51% is a ceiling, and the true share is a little lower. The detail is in how much the world’s best hotels publish, and whether a blog brings traffic.

On 8 October 2026 we counted the open job adverts on three hospitality job boards, which cover hotels, restaurants and catering: 28,359. A search for “copywriter” returned one, and it was an advert for a marketing manager; on one board alone, in the United Kingdom, a search for “head chef” returned 1,153. Job adverts show who is being sought on that day and say nothing about who is already employed or who works from outside: we go into it in who actually does the marketing in a hotel.

On 3 October 2026 we read 6,440 hotel websites in 72 countries: 956 say who built them. A credit says who built the site; it is silent on who runs the marketing today. The sample is an international list of hotels of every category and does not stand for luxury or for any one country: we describe it on the page about hotel website design agencies.

Last, reviews: 105,887 Google reviews of 277 upper-end hotels, the latest 500 for each, read between 1 and 8 October 2026. On a scale of 0 to 10, location scores 8.63 and the bill 4.49; without the correction for hotels with few reviews the bill would be 4.84. These are the hotels in our guide, chosen by us; the rest is on the page about hotel guest complaints.

They are snapshots of one day. They describe those websites, those adverts and those reviews; extending them to other hotels takes a new measurement.

You check a statistic with five questions, and ten minutes is enough. They are the ones we put to the ten figures in the table.

If all that is left at the end is a percentage and a name, leave it where it is. Take your own hotel’s acquisition cost to the next budget meeting, worked out from your own accounts: it has a source, a sample and a year, and they are yours.