There was a time when booking on a hotel brand’s website truly meant something. It meant trust. It meant consistency. It meant a promise delivered.
NB: This is an article from GuestCentric
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
If you chose Hilton, you knew what Hilton stood for. If you picked Marriott, you knew exactly what kind of experience awaited you before you even set foot in the lobby. These brands were not just logos – they were a signal to travelers of a clear, dependable standard of hospitality.
But today, those lines are blurring. Fast.
Earlier this year, for example, Marriott launched its Marriott Media Network – a move that effectively turns its digital assets, from in-room TVs to its mobile app, into ad inventory. Guests can look forward to Beyoncé’s shampoo on their TV screens, Visa’s cross-border fee ads interrupting their Netflix session, or a friendly insurance quote when they try to log into the Wi-Fi.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t guest experience innovation. It’s guest experience monetization. The hospitality industry used to be about crafting a seamless, comfortable, even aspirational stay. Now, some of the biggest brands in the world seem intent on transforming every guest touchpoint into a cash register.
Soft Brands: The Franchise Gold Rush
Meanwhile, the same big groups – Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt, Accor, IHG, Wyndham—are doubling down on their soft brand strategies. Names like Tribute, Autograph, Curio, JdV, Vignette, Voco, The Unbound Collection, and The Handwritten Collection have exploded across the landscape.
Why? Because soft brands scale quickly. They allow hotel groups to rapidly expand their footprint without the heavy lifting of enforcing expensive, uniform brand standards. Instead, they sell access to their distribution infrastructure, their loyalty programs, and their brand halo – without insisting on genuine consistency or quality.
For hotel owners, joining a soft brand can be attractive. It promises independence with global reach. But for guests? It often delivers inconsistency wrapped in a familiar booking funnel.
This is the quiet truth: the legacy hotel “brand” as we once knew it is disappearing. In its place, we see the rise of a platform strategy – a strategy that prioritizes scale, distribution, and monetization over delivering on a unified promise of hospitality.
From Brand to Distribution Platform
Today’s big hotel brands are behaving less like traditional brands and more like distribution platforms. They’re aggregating properties, optimizing yields, cross-selling across sub-brands, and monetizing every guest interaction.
In many ways, they’re beginning to look and act like OTAs. Their homepages increasingly resemble booking engines. Their apps function like marketplaces. The once-clear lines between brand, channel, and platform are dissolving.
This shift risks destroying the very thing that made these brands valuable in the first place: trust, clarity, and emotional connection with the guest. Instead of feeling curated and consistent, these hotel experiences are starting to feel like search engines – impersonal, transactional, and interchangeable.
