How to build a hotel marketing plan

A hotel marketing plan is five decisions, made in order, before anything is produced: the number that has to move, the one guest who moves it, the message and the proof under it, the work with a name and a date on every piece, and the four figures only the hotel can supply. What follows is what we measured on two five-star hotels while working out which five.

1. Start with the number that has to move

Before the plan, one measurement.

We took two five-star hotels and looked at the first page of Google for a hundred different searches each. Not searches for the hotel’s name: searches a guest makes before they have picked anywhere, like “best spa hotel in the city centre”.

One hotel showed up in the top ten results nine times out of a hundred. All nine were people searching its own name. The other showed up zero times out of a hundred.

Both rank first for themselves. Neither exists for anyone who has not already heard of them.

That is what a plan starts from: which dates are still empty, which rate is under pressure, and which kind of guest stopped coming back.

2. Pick one guest, and describe what they do

Your guests are already described, in detail, by the guests themselves. They are in the reviews.

We read 3,600 of them for one property and grouped them into a handful of recurring people: what they came for, what they noticed, what annoyed them. Marketing calls these archetypes. It just means the same kind of guest turning up again and again.

Then pick one for the month. One, because a month has one team and one calendar. Four audiences means four campaigns sharing the same three weeks, and each gets a quarter of the attention it was planned with. The other three are not lost. They are next month, and the month after, with the work from this one already done and reusable.

3. One message, and the proof underneath it

At the top of a Google results page there is often a box that answers the question directly, above all the links. Google calls it a featured snippet, and it lifts that answer off somebody’s website word for word.

Across those two hundred searches, our two hotels owned that box zero times. Booking.com owned it. TripAdvisor owned it. A competitor chain owned it.

So we looked at what is inside the box, and it is always the same shape: a question a guest would really ask, like “which luxury hotels are good for families”, answered in about fifty words. Neither hotel had a single paragraph written in that shape anywhere on its site. There was nothing to lift.

Your message works the same way. One sentence, and underneath it the proof in a form somebody else can quote: a review that says it, a page that shows it, a photograph that proves it.

4. Every deliverable gets a name and a date

This is the one that surprised us.

We asked ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity about the big annual event in each hotel’s city. Between 53 and 69 per cent of the time, the answer named the hotel.

Neither hotel has a single page on its website about that event.

The machines are recommending them for something they have never written down. That is a month of work that writes itself, and it arrives with its own deadline, because the event has a date.

Then the part that decides whether any of it happens: every piece of work gets one person’s name next to it and one date. A deliverable without a name is a wish. One without a date is next quarter. Whose name goes on it is its own decision. We put the three answers side by side: what an agency costs, next to hiring and next to us.

5. What a website cannot tell you, and what to ask for

Most audits of a hotel website start with speed. We ran that test too. It scores a site from 0 to 1, and the two hotels came back at 0.95 and 0.97. Nearly perfect. Speed was never the problem.

The things that actually decide the plan are not on the website at all: how full you already are, how fast bookings are arriving compared to last year, what your email list has been doing, and how much money you have.

So Lumina asks for those four instead of guessing. It takes about ten minutes to answer, and the answers change what the plan recommends.

6. We got the competitor list wrong, and the data told us

Before the audit we listed each hotel’s competitors the way any marketing team would: the other five-star names in the same city. Seven each.

Then we asked the data which sites turn up in the same searches. It agreed with one of our seven for the first hotel and two of seven for the second. Seventy per cent of the list was wrong.

The real answers were Booking.com, Expedia, TripAdvisor and the parent companies of the big chains. Not one is a hotel.

Both lists are right, for different jobs. The five-star names are who you are compared to once a guest is choosing between two places; the booking sites are who you lose the click to months earlier. Use the first to decide what to say, the second to decide where to show up. We had been using one for both, which is how you end up writing beautiful things nobody sees.