151 - Hotel Brand size by traffic
Compared to hotel chains, Airbnb is only 7th. Sinofsky vs Levie. PMS Integrations tax. Allbirds becomes an AI company. Hotel prices slashing for Worldcup amid [insert sensational term]
Hello,
This week I spoke to the director of a 17 room hotel who had switched to fully integrated payments. I asked him why? (It can’t be that big a deal in time saved). He said the owner wants the staff to spend more time with the guests. This is the way.
Best, Martin
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Headless software
With AI becoming the user interface and builder of interfaces there are questions on if enterprise software and systems like PMS even need a front end. I can see both sides. Lately I had to work on text for a page. AI didn’t make the content it built the whole page ready to publish. So do we need a CMS now? Do we just need databases and APIs? History says we need interfaces. Visionaries think not. Here are two great viewpoints. Sinofsky legendary Microsoft product guy, Levie the CEO of Box com
STEVEN SINOFSKY vs. AARON LEVIE
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies helping turn them into industry leaders. I'm also the co-founder of 10minutes.news a hotel news media that is unsensational, factual and keeps hoteliers updated on the industry. Omni Leans Into Lifestyle Branding
Omni Hotels’ partnership with Peter Millar shows how hospitality is leaning deeper into lifestyle positioning. It’s less about rooms, more about curated experiences and brand ecosystems. These collaborations can differentiate or they risk being surface-level marketing. But finding one’s niche is getting more and more important. See my column.
LIFESTYLE PARTNERSHIP
Loyalty Economics Under Pressure
The question around loyalty programs and automation is fascinating, if AI optimizes point usage, profitability models could break. These systems rely on inefficiencies. Remove friction, and margins shrink. Marriott alone has $4B in points liabilities.
LOYALTY SYSTEMS + LIABILITIES
Loewe Cracks TikTok Luxury
Loewe’s TikTok success shows that luxury can work on mass platforms, if done right. Consistency and content quality matter more than exclusivity here. It’s a shift in how luxury communicates.
LUXURY TIKTOK
Luxury Goes All-In on Sports
Luxury brands investing in sports has been a growing trend in the last few years. Probably in search for growth. Still it is interesting to see how the apparel brands are being lowered down and luxury brands are picking up the top line. Nike successfully used to be the winner’s brand. LVMH is looking to take the spot.
LUXURY SPORTS
The integration tax
The debate around unified hotel tech stacks continues vs best of breed continues. All-in-one systems risk mediocrity, but fragmentation creates inefficiencies. There’s no perfect answer, but the more I speak to people the more it seems all-in-one is the better way. One big point is the negotiating power of the hotel. Another is that there’s an increasingly high cost of integrations.
TECH STACKS
Stories that connect
The idea of telling great stories and connecting with the audience as an advertising solution isn’t new. The best salesmen are also amazing storytellers. With modern platforms there’s an opportunity for hotels to build great stories, micro stories. And maybe finding film school students to get creative could be a way. Just a thought.
AD NOSTALGIA
Travel as Identity
Apparently, travel choices are becoming expressions of identity, not just decisions based on price or loyalty. I don’t think it is a new thing. It is probably more obvious now with social media. But it has always been this way. It goes back to Grand Tours in Europe. But now one can take Ryanair to go to a luxury hotel.
IDENTITY TRAVEL
Worldcup slashing ADR
Lighthouse published data that hotels are slashing prices on the world cup. The story went into mainstream media, was converted into a story about anti-American sentiment, avoiding inflation - basically everything the media wants to hear. The reality is that the hotel industry doesn’t know how to deal with mega events. I am still looking for one mega event that was a great success in pricing. Olympics, World Cups, F1 special events etc. A computer would probably do a better job than humans on pricing these events.
THE SLASHING + MEGA EVENTS
Allbirds pivots from shoes to AI?
Allbirds, the company that made great wool sneakers but was copied by everyone else, was going broke recently. Somehow some people in consumer goods business thought that there was a new business model that didn’t include making making more money than you spend, there isn’t. But now they have changed from making good shoes to AI. And the stock market loved it. It feels like the early internet era where just adding .com to your name made you a Wall Street success. Suggested prompt to read the press release: Explain this to make like I’m a 5 year old.
NEWBIRDS
Opinion
Hotel Brands are Aggregators
We tend to think of hotel brands as, well, brands. Distinct identities. Lifestyle positioning. Design, tone of voice, target audience. But as I’ve repeatedly called them, they’re labels.
Traffic data shows the real power is at the holding company level. And that is where traffic, distribution, and ultimately control start to concentrate. Take the top six hotel groups. Together they capture roughly 84 percent of all organic traffic across 36 major players.
And here is where it gets interesting.
Outside of industry professionals and point hunters, I don’t think many navigate this consciously. They might think they are booking an Aloft hotel, or a Moxy, or a Pullman. But the moment you move through the booking flow, you are no longer interacting with a “brand.” You are inside Marriott, Accor, IHG.
Which means the real competition is not brand vs brand. It is system vs system.
This also explains why scale adds up so much. Marriott alone generates around 76 million organic visits per month. Hilton adds another 59 million. Wyndham contributes 30 million. The top three already control more traffic than the remaining 33 groups combined.
It get’s quite interesting when you start mixing in the OTAs into the mix. We often hear that Airbnb is “the new hotel company.” It is a great narrative. It positions them alongside Marriott, almost as a modern equivalent. I always thought it was smart, but a little deceptive. They were always an OTA.
Anyhow, Airbnb generates around 20 million organic visits. That places it below the top six hotel groups. Expedia, “the second biggest OTA”, would rank roughly fourth below Wyndham. And yet, Airbnb’s market cap sits at around $82 billion, not far off Marriott’s $95 billion.
Markets and reality are not always aligned. I think we know that by now.
Still a fun infographic and excercise done by the 10 Minutes Team. And they’re sharing the dataset with subscribers.
Ten fun facts that stood out from the dataset:
The top 3 hotel groups control 56.4 percent of all organic traffic
The top 6 control 83.8 percent
The median hotel group gets less than 1 million visits
Marriott is 81 times larger than the median
Booking.com alone exceeds the combined traffic of the top 6 hotel groups, which also means more than 83.8% of the rest of the hotel groups
Agoda is roughly equal in size to Marriott in organic traffic, meaning Agoda alone is bigger than #1
OTAs collectively generate 2.9 times more traffic than hotel groups
So yes, brands still matter. But not in the way we often think. I guess everyone needs to become the number one of their niche and then these comparisons don’t matter anymore. Or do they?
• The OpenAI Soap Opera continues - Link
• The inspiration Benchmark for hospitality - Link⁺
• Playbook for the Agency of the Future - Link
• The AI Cheat-Sheet for Executives - Link
Did you know: The word "advertising" comes from the verb "advertise," which is from the Middle English "advertisen," meaning "to take notice of" or "to inform." This in turn comes from the Old French "advertir" and Latin "advertere," meaning "to turn toward." The sense of promoting products or services began around the 18th century. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺