Weekly Insights. November 1, 2025

How is the industry’s shift toward experience-based booking reshaping hotel revenue strategy?

Guests, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, are no longer booking the cheapest room or even the best view. They are choosing based on experiences: a wellness package, a chef-led dinner, a sustainable stay, or a curated local adventure that feels uniquely theirs.

For revenue leaders, this evolution changes the game. The traditional room-centric model is giving way to value-based packaging and personalized monetization, where emotional connection, purpose, and story define price elasticity more than comps or BAR grids ever could.

Winning hotels are already experimenting: dynamic bundling inside booking engines, AI-driven personalization that surfaces experiences in real time, and cross-departmental collaboration where marketing, F&B, and revenue teams design value together.

The challenge is not just setting the right price but pricing the right experience. When perceived value becomes the guest's starting point, not the hotel's ending one, the real question becomes: how do we measure and monetize experiences as effectively as we once did rooms?

5 signs your compset could be holding you back

The HotStats article explains how a poorly chosen comp set can distort strategy and hold performance back. Warning signs include competitors with the wrong segment mix, different price positioning, amenities or meeting space that do not match your demand drivers, seasonal patterns that do not align, or properties in renovation cycles that skew results. It recommends rebuilding around hotels that mirror your guest mix and revenue streams, validating with data on rate, occupancy, ancillary income, and costs, and reviewing the set regularly so benchmarking guides smarter pricing, mix, and profit decisions.

Beyond 100% RGI: Grow profit with a data-driven guest journey

The article says that in a flat market, growth should come from wallet share rather than market share. It recommends unifying data from systems like PMS, POS, and reviews to manage the entire guest journey, improving acquisition, conversion, in stay spending, and retention. It also stresses running a leaner operation so more revenue turns into profit.

What keeps revenue managers up at night (and it’s not ghosts)

The article highlights the biggest worries for revenue managers today, including unpredictable demand, forecast accuracy, and pressure to hit targets with limited time and data quality issues. It points to rate parity leaks, OTA dependence, and competitor moves as constant stressors, alongside internal hurdles like siloed teams and slow adoption of tech.

The hidden reason your hotel segmentation isn’t working

The article says hotel segmentation fails without strong first party data. It explains that relying on partial reservation info leads to targeting the wrong person, sending messages at the wrong time, and creating irrelevant segments. The fix is to unify and use real time guest data from PMS, booking engine, communications, and past stays to build complete profiles, tailor messages, and convert more effectively.

Is social media becoming transactional?

For years, social media was the top of the funnel, a place for storytelling and inspiration, not conversion. However, a recent Adtaxi study reveals just how dramatically these platforms have evolved into commerce engines, with 54% of U.S. adults seeking product or service recommendations on social media and 20% already purchasing directly within the apps.

With 90% of adults active monthly and an average of 4.7 platforms per user, social media has become a near-universal behavioral ecosystem.

Recently, TikTok's new integration with Booking.com has pushed this transformation even further, allowing users to move seamlessly from inspiration to booking without ever leaving the platform. The app is rapidly shifting from a discovery engine to a full booking funnel.

Social media might soon no longer be the billboard before the shop, but the shop itself. When an influencer posts a reel or even an AI-generated itinerary that becomes instantly bookable, the platform itself becomes the destination.

But if inspiration, discovery, and purchase now occur within the same digital space, what happens to OTAs, brand.com, or even the very concept of the "booking funnel"?

AI buzzwords decoded (for hoteliers who just want to know what the heck is going on)

This article explains what AI and generative AI are, how to make your content easy for AI answers to find, and how tools can connect AI to live prices and booking systems. It also covers AI agents that can do multi step tasks, and how different AIs can talk to each other safely. The advice for hotels is to keep content clear and up to date, keep data organized, and connect systems so AI assistants can find the hotel, show real rates, and help guests book.

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