By Pablo Revale
July 29, 2026 · 3 Minutes
Adapted from Originally published in Unstoppable Hospitality on LinkedIn.
Most hotel marketing teams are measured on two key metrics: conversion and heads in beds. Catch the guest who is already searching, already deciding, already at the bottom of the funnel. Convert the ready. It works. Until it doesn’t. This creates a chain of consequences most of you have already lived. More pressure from stakeholders to lift short-term revenue ("We need this fixed immediately."). Budget pulled from anything long-term ("We’re prioritizing other initiatives."). Every conversion dip blamed on a bad offer or a performance issue, never on the missing demand ("This sale is a mess. Send traffic to a generic landing page."). Sounds familiar?
If capture is your only game, your revenue looks like a heartbeat monitor. You’re always fishing in the same small pool, the slice of your market that is ready to book right now. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s 95:5 rule puts that slice at roughly 5% of a market at any given moment. Marketers are usually judged on one number: conversion rate. But conversion falls for all kinds of reasons, and it’s better read as a mix of traffic quality (40%), available inventory (40%), and UX and positioning (20%). When a hotel never does the work of creating future demand, it shows up later as a deep conversion valley. The in-market pool thins, you push paid harder into colder traffic, that traffic converts worse, and the number gets blamed on the wrong team.
So some teams run the other way. All brand, all content, all cultivation. Fill the top with the 95% who aren’t ready yet, nurture the middle, wait. That fails differently. Revenue dips, because nobody is closing. Demand piles up in the middle of the funnel with no mechanism to turn it into rooms. You manufactured interest and never gave it a door.
Tom Smith has a thesis I keep coming back to. The whole game is the balance between cultivating value and capturing it. Cultivate without capture, and you feed a funnel that never pays. Capture without cultivate, and you drain a pool that never refills. A healthy funnel does both at once. It captures the demand that’s ready today, which pays the bills. And it cultivates the demand that isn’t ready yet, the only thing that makes next quarter’s revenue less dependent on how much you have to spend to catch that 5%. The hotels that only capture are renting their revenue from Google and the OTAs, and the rent is 15-25% of the booking value. The ones that balance are building a long-term asset. An audience they keep, so the next time that guest travels, they come straight to you. Independent leaders already run 40 to 55% direct. The industry average sits at 25 to 30%. Where are you? Capture pays you today. Cultivation pays your future self.
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute / LinkedIn B2B Institute, the 95:5 rule: only around 5% of a market is actively in-market at any moment. RateGain, hotel direct booking vs OTA: OTAs control roughly 55% of global hotel bookings. Hospitality Net, the independent hotelier’s playbook for reducing OTA commission: 15 to 25% headline commission, closer to 30 to 35% all-in. Heads on Pillows, direct booking vs OTA: direct keeps 95 to 98% of revenue against 78 to 85% via OTAs, and independent leaders reach 40 to 55% direct.
