The Cost of Complexity: Why Misunderstanding the Hospitality Customer Journey Is Holding Brands Back

The funnel is a fiction

The hospitality industry has historically loved the purchase funnel. Awareness, consideration, intent, conversion - clean stages, clear metrics, neat budget allocations. The problem is that travellers don't move through a funnel. They loop, backtrack, compare, get distracted, come back, reconsider. The journey looks less like a slide and more like a heartbeat monitor.

A potential guest might search on desktop while planning, switch to mobile to browse Instagram stories from a hotel they've been eyeing, check a review site on their lunch break, get retargeted on a streaming platform that evening, then finally book three weeks later on a comparison site they've visited four times before.²

None of those moments happen in isolation. But too often, the marketing behind them does.

Too many markets, too many platforms - and not enough impact

Here's a pattern we see constantly with hospitality clients: in an effort to cover the full journey and reach travellers wherever they are, brands spread themselves across six feeder markets and eight different platforms simultaneously. On paper, it looks comprehensive. In reality, it's a recipe for dilution.

The logic is understandable. If customers are touching 45 different moments before booking, surely the answer is to be present across as many of those moments as possible? But presence without weight isn't influence - it's noise. A brand appearing at a low frequency across too many markets and too many channels rarely registers with anyone. You end up technically everywhere and meaningfully nowhere.

Feeder markets are a particular blind spot. We regularly see budgets fractured across a long list of origin cities or countries, each receiving just enough investment to appear active but not enough to actually move the needle. The cost of running campaigns across that many markets - with localised creative, platform fees, management overhead, and measurement complexity - quietly cannibalises the budget that should be driving real performance.

The same logic applies to platforms. Every channel has a pitch. Every platform promises incremental reach. But chasing touchpoints across every available surface without strategic prioritisation doesn't build a journey - it just runs up costs.

Bigger and better beats broader and thinner

The counter-intuitive truth in hospitality media is that concentration often outperforms coverage. Going deeper in fewer, higher-value feeder markets - with real budget weight, consistent presence, and coordinated messaging across a focused set of channels - drives more bookings than a thin spread across twice as many.

This isn't just intuition. Decades of advertising effectiveness research consistently show that share of voice has a direct relationship with share of market - and that brands which invest below the threshold needed to register in a given market are effectively wasting that spend.³ The same principle applies to feeder market strategy: half-measures in ten markets rarely add up to what full commitment in three would deliver.

The brands we see pulling ahead aren't the ones with the most complex channel mixes. They're the ones that have made hard, data-led decisions about where to concentrate - and then had the conviction to actually do it.

Siloed budgets, siloed thinking

When paid search, social, display, and programmatic are managed as separate channels with separate KPIs and separate teams, what you lose isn't just efficiency. You lose coherence. You lose the ability to understand which combination of touchpoints actually drove a booking, and which ones were just along for the ride.

We've seen hospitality brands confidently attribute conversion to last-click search - and then discover, when they dig into the data, that the guest had been in the funnel for six weeks. The search click didn't start the relationship. It just happened to be the last thing that got tagged.

That's not a measurement problem. It's a strategy problem. Effectiveness research consistently shows that the majority of touchpoints shaping brand preference and purchase decisions occur well before any active intent signal is visible - yet these are precisely the interactions that most attribution models ignore entirely.³

Presence as a performance lever

One of the most undervalued concepts in hospitality media right now is what we'd call journey coverage: the share of relevant touchpoints where a brand is actually present and influential.

Most brands are good at the moments when someone is clearly ready to book. They're less good at the weeks before, when the destination is still being chosen, the property type is still being debated, and the difference between a 4-star and a boutique can pivot on a single piece of content seen at the right time.

This is where a unified, media-led strategy pays dividends that last-click attribution will never show you. Being present during the dreaming phase doesn't just build awareness - it tilts the consideration set before the deliberate search even begins. Google's travel research points directly to this: travellers who encounter a brand early in the inspiration phase are significantly more likely to return to it at the point of booking.²

The brands that understand this aren't just buying media. They're shaping the journey.

Knowing where to place your bets

Deciding which markets to prioritise and which platforms to invest in isn't always intuitive - especially when you're sitting on years of fragmented campaign data across different channels and geographies. This is where marketing mix modelling becomes genuinely valuable.

Rather than relying on last-click data or gut instinct, MMM uses statistical modelling to isolate the actual contribution of each channel, market, and tactic to overall revenue.⁴ For hospitality brands grappling with complex feeder market decisions, it answers the questions that most attribution tools can't: What would happen if we cut spend in this market and doubled down in another? Which platform combination is generating the highest return per booking? Where is budget sitting idle?

We use MMM as a strategic input - not just a reporting exercise - to help clients make the kind of focused, confident investment decisions that drive real impact. It's what separates a media plan built on conviction from one built on habit.

The growth case for getting this right

We're not making an argument for complexity for its own sake. The goal isn't to be everywhere - it's to be in the right places, with the right message, at the right stage of a journey that's longer and messier than most hospitality brands have planned for.

Brands that get this right don't just see better short-term conversion rates. They build something harder to replicate: a presence in the consideration set that competitors can't easily buy their way into.

In a category where loyalty is fragile and switching costs are low, that's not a nice-to-have. It's the whole game.

References

¹ McKinsey & Company. How to serve today's digital traveler. McKinsey Travel, Logistics & Infrastructure Practice, 2018.

² Think with Google. 3 ways the digital traveler changed in 2018.

³ Binet, L. & Field, P. The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), 2013.

⁴ Nielsen. Understanding Marketing Mix Modeling. Nielsen Insights, December 2020.