Digital marketing decoded: Budgeting 101
Your 2027 marketing budget is answering the wrong question
Most hotel marketing budgets start with the same question: what percentage of revenue should we spend? It’s the wrong starting point. A boutique hotel and a 1,000 room property carry very different fixed technology costs, and a flat percentage benchmark ignores that entirely.
The better question is what it actually costs you to acquire a direct booking, and whether that cost is shrinking or growing over time. OTA commissions scale linearly forever. A well built direct channel does the opposite: the first booking from a guest is expensive, the next one is nearly free.
This guide walks through how to set a defensible 2027 budget using cost of acquisition instead of guesswork, where a strong ROAS number can actually be hiding weak growth, and what AI search and agentic booking mean for where your dollars need to go next.
What you’ll learn
- Why anchoring your budget to cost of acquisition works better than a flat percentage of revenue, and what benchmark to us
- Why a 15:1 ROAS can be a warning sign instead of a win
- How to compare direct bookings against OTA commissions using net revenue, not booking volume
- What’s changing in 2027 with AI search, agentic booking, and first-party data, and how to budget for it
- Eight questions worth asking your agency before you finalize next year’s spend
Download the guide today and start preparing your 2027 strategy for AI search and agentic booking, so your visibility, direct revenue, and long-term growth aren’t left to chance.
