Marketing in travel and hospitality
travel marketing: the direct vs OTA battle, loyalty programs, dynamic pricing, and selling an experience.
This block builds marketing fluency specific to travel and hospitality, an industry defined by perishable inventory, high-intent search behavior, long booking windows, and intense OTA-driven price transparency. You will examine how brands acquire guests across metasearch, OTAs, direct channels, and loyalty programs, and how demand fluctuates with seasonality and events. The block moves from foundational marketing concepts adapted to booking funnels, through the specific metrics that determine channel profitability and guest lifetime value, to the compliance obligations governing pricing claims, promotional disclosures, and data use in travel advertising. The goal is practical fluency: reading a hotel or airline marketing dashboard, questioning channel mix decisions, and spotting regulatory exposure before a campaign launches, without needing a marketing degree or a legal background.
What you'll master
- Map the traveler purchase journey and identify where OTAs, metasearch, and direct channels each influence conversion
- Calculate and interpret CAC, RevPAR-linked marketing ROI, LTV, and funnel conversion rates using sector benchmarks
- Evaluate channel mix and loyalty program economics to judge whether a marketing budget is being spent efficiently
- Audit a travel marketing campaign for compliance with pricing transparency, advertising, and consumer-protection rules before launch
Key terms
Modules
Applies core marketing tactics to booking, loyalty, pricing and experience in the travel sector.
Covers the booking funnel, cost and value metrics, and sector benchmarking.
Covers advertising, pricing and cancellation rules that travel campaigns must follow.
Latest articles
Recent articles from the blog that apply to Travel & Hospitality.
- A guest who returns once a decade is still worth modelling at full five-figure valueStandard LTV formulas break when your best customers disappear for three years between stays. This article shows how to rebuild the calculation so it reflects what a hotel or resort guest is genuinely worth over a lifetime of irregular, high-value visits.
- How Marriott cut OTA dependency and defended direct booking shareMarriott's multi-year campaign to reduce its reliance on Booking.com and Expedia reshaped how the hotel industry thinks about distribution costs and guest ownership. This case study breaks down the specific moves Marriott made, what the numbers show, and what CMOs in hospitality can take from it.