Notes on hospitality marketing, brand strategy, and what it takes to build a property that guests come back to.
The 2026 Cloudbeds State of Independent Hotels report has now quantified what OTA dependency actually costs. In Portugal and Spain, independent properties surrender up to 79.7 percent of their total distribution control to third-party platforms. This is not a concentration problem. It is a valuation problem.
Every month, somewhere in the world, a hospitality ownership group sits across from a quarterly marketing review and approves a retainer for an agency whose primary output is a deck celebrating metrics that have no relationship to whether the property generated profit. The meeting ends. The retainer is renewed.
Fifty-eight percent of global travellers in 2026 are actively selecting Superior or Luxury room categories at the point of booking. They are making this decision on emotional and experiential grounds before financial ones. The question they are asking before they see a price: does this property feel like it belongs to the experience I want?