The Hospitality Marketer’s AI Moment

By John Coldicutt, SVP of Marketing at The Access Group 

There’s a quiet transformation happening in hospitality marketing. Not the dramatic, robot-in-the-lobby kind. Something more consequential: a fundamental shift in how guests discover venues, how they decide to return, and how marketing teams — often small, always stretched — can compete at a scale that simply wasn’t possible three years ago.

The pressure is real. Budgets aren’t growing. Teams aren’t either. But consumer expectations absolutely are. According to recent research, 71% of consumers now expect personalised interactions every time they engage with a brand. Not occasionally. Every time. For a marketing team running campaigns across ten, fifty, or five hundred sites, that’s an enormous ask — unless you have the right tools doing the heavy lifting.

This is where AI stops being a buzzword and starts being a genuine competitive advantage.

But wasn’t CRM already doing this?

It’s a fair question — and one that comes up regularly when hospitality operators sit down with their tech providers. “You’re describing automated campaigns and segmentation. We’ve had MailChimp for years. What’s actually new?”

The honest answer is: the automation was always there. But the data underneath it wasn’t. And neither was the intelligence that’s now possible on top of it.

To understand what’s genuinely changed, it helps to trace the journey that hospitality marketing technology has been on — and where AI fits into it.

CRM — the starting point: Most operators began with a transactional CRM: a database of bookings, purchases, loyalty sign-ups. Useful for sending emails. Limited in what it could tell you. The data was siloed, incomplete, and largely static.

SCV — the missing link: The next step was building a Single Customer View (SCV) — connecting those fragmented records into a unified identity for each guest. The booking history, the loyalty card, the Wi-Fi sign-in, and the review on Google all became the same person. A significant leap. But it still required human analysts to interrogate the data and turn it into action.

CDP — real-time intelligence: A Customer Data Platform (CDP) takes the SCV and makes it dynamic — refreshing in real time as guests interact across channels, enabling smarter audience building and more responsive personalisation.

Then AI arrives on top of all of this — and the picture changes fundamentally.

"The automation was always possible. What LLMs add is the ability to process vastly larger, messier, and more varied data — and act on it in ways no SQL query or rules-based system ever could."

Here’s the critical shift: your guests’ digital footprints are growing exponentially. Every reservation, online order, Wi-Fi login, website visit, app interaction, and review leaves a trace. The volume and variety of this data has outgrown what conventional segmentation models were built to handle. Historic rules-based systems could act on a birthday or a lapse interval. They couldn’t find micro-segments — the Tuesday lunch regulars who always upgrade their wine but haven’t visited in six weeks, or the guests most likely to respond to a new venue opening nearby.

LLMs can. They identify patterns across complex, multi-source data at a scale and speed that wasn’t previously possible. And then — through agentic AI — they do something genuinely new: they write the copy, optimise the subject line, and scan the content for inbox placement, all without a human copywriter in the loop.

Three years ago, even the best-segmented campaign still needed someone to write it. Today, the model can generate personalised content for ten audience segments simultaneously, each with a different message, tone, and timing. That is the new capability. That is what’s changed.

The discovery problem is already here

Let’s start with a stat that should make every hospitality marketer sit up: 37% of travellers are already using large language models to plan and book trips. Not Google. Not TripAdvisor. AI assistants — and the number is growing fast.

BCG’s recent research on AI disruption in hospitality paints a stark picture: the hotels and restaurants that will win algorithmically aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest brand budgets. They’re the ones whose content is machine-readable, structured, and consistent across every platform — from their own website to third-party review sites to social channels. Brand equity, BCG argues, is shifting from name recognition to algorithmic relevance.

For marketing teams, this is both a threat and an opportunity. The threat: if your venue’s digital footprint is thin, inconsistent, or poorly structured, AI engines simply won’t surface it. The opportunity: the playing field is more level than it’s ever been. A well-run independent venue with great reviews, rich guest-generated content, and a strong local story can outrank a bigger competitor that’s still relying on outdated digital assets.

The practical action here is straightforward: audit your digital presence through the lens of an AI search engine, not a human one. Is your content answering the specific questions guests ask — not just “does the venue have private dining?” but “can you accommodate a gluten-free menu for a 20-person corporate lunch?” Depth and specificity matter more than volume.

The personalisation gap — and how to close it

Here’s a number that tends to shock operators when they first see it: on average, 70% of a hospitality business’s database consists of customers who have visited only once. The bulk of marketing spend and effort often goes towards attracting that 70% — when the real revenue engine is the 30% who return.

AI-enabled CRM changes that equation entirely. Rather than treating your database as a single audience, modern systems can segment with precision — using transaction history, visit frequency, spend patterns, and channel preferences to identify your highest-value guests and communicate with them in ways that genuinely resonate.

The results, when done well, are striking. Gaucho automated 90% of their CRM campaigns through Acteol, and saw visits from automated campaigns increase by 125%. Gusto Italian used AI-powered loyalty management to launch their Platinum Club — and within the first week had over 1,000 sign-ups, with 91% of those members visiting a venue since joining, spending on average 134% more per visit than non-members.

These aren’t outlier results. They’re what happens when you stop sending the same message to everyone and start having genuinely personalised conversations with your guests at scale.

Flynn Group — the world’s largest restaurant franchise operator — has articulated the direction of travel well. Their VP of Business Insights, Ashley Fenn, describes a near-future where a guest opens an app and sees a pop-up: “Hey, it’s Tuesday. Would you like us to place your usual order? We know you want it ready at 6pm.” The technology to do something close to that already exists. The gap is mostly in willingness to invest and connect the data.

The efficiency opportunity most teams are missing

Beyond personalisation, AI delivers something equally valuable to lean marketing teams: time back.

Consider the Black Boy Inn in Caernarfon — a historic pub with no dedicated marketing team. By implementing AI-powered CRM, they grew their contactable database from 22,000 to over 100,000 in under nine months, attributed more than £30,000 directly to marketing activity, and — critically — cut campaign creation time by over 30%. For a small team, that’s not a marginal gain. It’s transformational.

The principle at work here is simple. AI doesn’t replace the marketer’s judgement or creativity. It automates the mechanical parts — building audience segments, generating campaign copy variations, optimising send times and subject lines, scanning content for inbox placement, processing feedback — so that human attention goes where it genuinely matters: strategy, creativity, and guest relationships.

Flynn Group’s Jeremy Biser frames it this way: as automation handles routine tasks, every human touchpoint with the guest becomes more valuable, not less. When AI handles the campaign logistics, your team can focus on what makes your brand distinctive — the story, the experience, the community connection that no algorithm can replicate.

Where to start: a practical framework

For hospitality marketing leaders thinking about where AI investment makes the most immediate sense, the evidence points to three priority areas:

1. Guest data unification. The single biggest enabler of AI-powered marketing is a clean, unified view of your guest. Not a loyalty record here and a booking history there — a genuine Single Customer View that connects every touchpoint: bookings, EPOS, Wi-Fi, app, reviews. This is the foundation. Without it, personalisation is impossible and segmentation is superficial. If your systems are fragmented, fixing this is the highest-ROI project on your list.

2. Campaign automation and workflow. Once your data is in order, the efficiency gains from AI-powered campaign automation are immediate. Welcome journeys, re-engagement sequences, birthday offers, post-visit feedback, lapsed guest recovery — these should be running continuously and adapting to guest behaviour, not being manually built from scratch each quarter. Segmented campaigns can generate up to 760% more revenue than blanket communications. That delta is too large to ignore.

3. Predictive loyalty. The most forward-thinking marketing teams are moving beyond reactive segmentation to predictive engagement — using AI to identify which guests are at risk of lapsing before they lapse, which ones are ready to trade up to a higher loyalty tier, and which offers are most likely to drive a return visit from each individual. This is where the compounding value of good guest data really becomes apparent — and it’s the capability that no rules-based CRM, however well-configured, can replicate.

The broader context

BCG’s research finds that AI leaders in hospitality can expand operating margins by nearly double compared to laggards — driven by revenue gains, cost reduction, and the compounding effect of better data over time. The hospitality industry as a whole is still early in this journey: only around 25% of companies are actively scaling AI, and fewer still are extracting its full value.

That means the window for differentiation is open — but it won’t stay open indefinitely. The operators who invest in data quality, CRM capability, and marketing automation now will build advantages that are genuinely hard to close later: richer guest profiles, better-trained models, and deeper institutional knowledge about what works for their specific audience.

The journey from CRM to SCV to CDP to AI isn’t just a technology roadmap — it’s a compounding flywheel. Each layer makes the next one more powerful. And AI, layered on top of genuinely unified guest data, is where that flywheel starts spinning fast enough to matter.

For hospitality marketing teams, the question isn’t whether to embrace AI. It’s where to start — and how to do it in a way that amplifies what makes your brand human, rather than replacing it.

The answer, almost always, is to start with the guest. Know them better. Communicate with them more relevantly. Give them reasons to return. AI doesn’t change that fundamental truth about hospitality. It just gives you the tools to act on it at scale.