For many luxury hotels, third-party email marketing still carries emotional baggage. It brings back memories of the late 1990s and early 2000s – indiscriminate blasts, questionable lists, brand damage, and inbox fatigue. Back then, email was cheap, uncontrolled, and largely unaccountable. Hotels were right to walk away.
NB: This is an article from Americas Great Resorts
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But here’s what never gets discussed. Hotels didn’t refine outbound acquisition. They abandoned it.
And in that vacuum, online travel platforms quietly took control of demand.
This article explains how that happened – and why modern third-party email, when executed correctly, now represents one of the most powerful ways luxury properties can reclaim guest ownership and reduce OTA dependence.
The Spam Era – Why the Fear Was Rational
Early email marketing earned its reputation for a reason. It relied on random purchased lists, mass broadcasting, zero targeting, and no meaningful consent frameworks. There were no deliverability standards, no brand protection, and no attribution.
That wasn’t marketing. That was noise.
Luxury hotels stepped away to protect their brands – a reasonable decision at the time.
But instead of replacing crude outbound tactics with something more sophisticated, the industry largely exited upstream acquisition altogether. Hotels preserved retention systems, CRM platforms, and loyalty programs – but they stopped actively creating owned demand.
While Hotels Pulled Back, OTAs Moved In
As hotels retreated from outbound guest acquisition, third-party platforms did the opposite. They invested billions into search visibility, traveler identity databases, behavioral targeting, remarketing infrastructure, and intent modeling.
Over time, these platforms became the default discovery engine for luxury travel. This shift was structural – even if its impact unfolded over time.
Hotels no longer controlled how guests found them. They received transactions. Platforms owned relationships.
That distinction still defines today’s hospitality economics.
The Modern Contradiction No One Confronts
Luxury hotels now accept something extraordinary as normal business practice. They willingly pay 18–25% commissions to platforms to introduce guests they will never truly own.
These are guests whose discovery and remarketing are controlled by the platform, who default back to OTA channels on their next trip, and who rarely become part of a hotel’s upstream audience – even if they appear in the hotel’s PMS after the stay.
Yet many of these same properties hesitate to use third-party email introductions because of something that happened in 1999 – even though those guests would book direct, enter the hotel’s CRM, become owned identities, generate repeat stays, and create lifetime value.
The contradiction isn’t cost. It’s ownership blindness.
Hotels are comfortable paying to lose guests – but afraid to introduce guests they would own for life.
