Resources

Everything a hotel commercial director needs to know about brand partnerships.

Structured, specific and written in hospitality commercial language. Each resource answers a real question GMs, commercial directors and brand managers are asking – in specific markets, for specific categories.

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The questions that matter before a partnership is agreed.

Guide

How do hotels generate revenue from wellness brand partnerships?

Most hotel commercial directors still think of wellness brand partnerships as a supplier arrangement – a toiletries deal, a branded amenity kit, a co-branded spa menu. That framing captures perhaps fifteen percent of the commercial opportunity. The rest sits in formats that most hotels have not yet explored, generating revenue through channels that RevPAR will never measure.

Guide

TRevPAG: total revenue per actual guest

RevPAR tells you how efficiently you are filling rooms. TRevPAG tells you how much total commercial value each guest generates across your entire property. They measure fundamentally different things – and most hotels are optimising for the wrong one.

Guide

Which wellness brands work with five-star hotels in the UK?

The more useful question is not "which brands?" but "which brand categories fit my property's specific guest profile and physical footprint?" The answer varies considerably between a city-centre business hotel with a rooftop spa and a countryside estate built around wellness as the primary draw. Getting the category right precedes identifying the brand.

Guide

What is the difference between in-room placement and a branded experience?

These terms appear in the same conversations and are sometimes treated as synonyms, but they describe fundamentally different commercial relationships. The distinction matters because the two formats carry different revenue structures, different operational requirements, and different implications for guest experience. Choosing the wrong format for a given touchpoint is one of the most common reasons hotel brand partnerships underperform.

Guide

How long does a hotel brand partnership take to become profitable?

The honest answer depends on the partnership format, the revenue model, and the quality of the commercial case that was built before the partnership was agreed. A supply contract with a coffee brand generates margin from the first box of capsules. A co-created branded suite with custom amenities and a dedicated PR programme takes longer to recoup its setup costs – but produces a different order of commercial return when it does.

Guide

How to drive direct bookings for your hotel

Direct bookings are the holy grail of hotel commercial strategy – lower distribution costs, guest data ownership, and the ability to build a relationship that outlasts the stay. Yet most hotels are still losing 25–40 percent of their revenue to OTA commissions and third-party booking fees. The standard playbook – better website, tighter rate parity, more metasearch spend – matters. But it leaves the most powerful lever untouched: creating in-property experiences that guests specifically seek out, and that no OTA can replicate or promise.

Commercial strategy

Fifty resources on each commercial priority.

Practitioner-level content on the six themes that decide whether a hotel outperforms its comp set – written for commercial directors, not search engines.

Partnership strategy