Luxury hotel demand generation is often misunderstood – especially when email marketing is expected to create demand instead of convert it. When luxury hotels miss booking targets, the post-mortem tends to sound the same.
NB: This is an article from Americas Great Resorts
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- Email isn’t performing.
- The CRM isn’t driving enough revenue.
- The database isn’t engaging.
- The automations need work.
- The creative needs to be refreshed.
That diagnosis is intuitively appealing because it points to something the hotel can control: a platform, a vendor, a workflow, a campaign calendar.
But it is usually wrong.
Luxury hotels do not have an email problem. They have a demand problem – specifically, a demand ownership problem.
We define the solution layer as Owned Demand Infrastructure (ODI) – the structural system that determines whether a hotel controls demand introduction before intermediaries, algorithms, and marketplaces shape the buying environment. ODI is not a replacement for email or CRM. It is the upstream layer that makes those downstream systems perform the role they were designed to play.
Email and CRM systems are downstream instruments. They can improve conversion, retention, and lifetime value once demand exists. They cannot solve the upstream economic reality that determines whether demand arrives in the first place, who controls it, and what conditions come attached to it.
The most important variable in modern luxury hospitality growth is not whether your lifecycle journeys are optimized. It is whether your hotel owns access to qualified travelers before intermediaries and auctions dictate the buying environment.
Until that is understood, teams will continue to optimize conversion systems while demand control keeps drifting away – and the organization will keep blaming the wrong thing.
Why This Keeps Happening: Hospitality Confuses Optimization With Growth
In most industries, it is obvious that “growth” and “optimization” are different.
In luxury hospitality, the distinction is persistently blurred because the industry’s tools, reporting, and organizational incentives encourage it.
Optimization is the improvement of performance inside an existing system. It assumes the system is correct and tries to raise efficiency within it.
Growth requires changing the system that produces the outcomes.
Luxury hotels keep trying to grow through optimization because optimization is what their tool stack can see:
