Hello,
So many things are changing in marketing with AI. But now’s a really good time to think about what will not change in the coming decade. Also, being weird is not really a strategy unless you only want to reach those who identify as weird.
PS: If you haven’t filled out my survey, I’d love to have your reader feedback.
Best, Martin
Pragmatik builds high-converting
MQL engines through targeted content.
Just find out more ➛
Opinion
In Marketing “be different” is Overrated
There’s a common piece of marketing advice that I think gets interpreted the wrong way: you need to stand out. Be different. Don’t look like everyone else. Somehow, “different” has increasingly become “weird.”
Weird hero shot. Weird hotel interiors. Weird design. Put a bathtub in the lobby, paint the ceiling orange, give the rooms strange names and some hotels think they’re onto something. It might get attention. It will probably get media coverage. But attention and revenue aren’t the same thing.
Liquid Death is an interesting example. Selling water in a can that looks like an energy drink with a name that sounds rock n’ roll is weird. But the weirdness wasn’t the product. They found an audience for whom that difference was relevant. At a rock concert with a bottle of Evian is just not the right vibe, but a can of Liquid Death is relevant. It was different yes. It was weird, true. But mostly it was just more relevant.
Marketers need to think about differentiation the same way.
If a hotel’s target is families, standing out doesn’t mean having the weirdest family hotel. It means being 101% relevant to your target audience. Breakfast that works for children (and which parents can approve). A pool kids are allowed to use. Areas where noise isn’t going to be a problem. Connecting rooms for families with 3 kids. etc.
CitizenM is another good example. It certainly felt weird when it arrived. Oddly erotic posters. Bizarre modern art. Small rooms. Funky quotes. But I don’t think it succeeded because it was weird. It succeeded because the product was incredibly relevant for short-stay business travelers.
Many times I walked through CitizenM livingroom (not a lobby) late in the evening. It wasn’t filled with designers, musicians and super cool creative people. Mostly, it was filled with office workers. Accountants, salespeople, people with regular laptops.
The slightly funky environment gave a conventional business traveler something aspirational. For a night or two they could stay somewhere that made them feel a little more creative, social and interesting, while still getting exactly what they needed from a hotel: Comfort and efficiency. It was more relevant than the other hotels, with a plus of being more creative.
The mistake is starting with the question, “How can we be different?” Start instead with, “Who are we trying to be incredibly relevant to?”
Then exaggerate the things that matter to those people. You might end up with something unusual. You might even end up with something weird.
But weird should be the consequence, not the strategy.
Being different gets attention. Being relevant gets customers. Also, read my first principles of marketing here.
About me: I'm a fractional CMO for large travel technology companies, and the co-founder of Pragmatik, an agency that drives MQLs through highly relevant content and distribution. You can find out more at wearepragmatik.com. Ads That Turn Into Agents
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AGENTIC ADVERTISING. - SIX MONTH OF GPT ADS
Airbnb Is Selling the Audience
Airbnb’s valuation seems to be growing much faster than bookings, which suggests investors are betting on something other than simply selling more accommodation. Airbnb has an audience planning travel and it seems investors believe they could expand that. It’s not like OTAs haven’t been doing that for a while. Let’s see if they can make it happen.
AIRBNB AUDIENCE
Reddit Spam Meets AI Search
For a while there was a fairly simplistic idea that getting mentioned repeatedly on Reddit, would automatically improve visibility in AI answers. As the saying goes, when the metric becomes the goal it no longer is a useful metric. Now, apparently that game is already getting harder as models become better at discounting content designed primarily to manipulate them. GEO may end up looking a lot like SEO eventually did: useful fundamentals surrounded by increasingly complicated attempts to game an algorithm.
AI SEARCH SPAM
Having AI vs Having a Plan
There’s a lot of talk about “what AI features do you have” and it’s cool. So many features are being added that it really seems like christmas of features. But AI needs more than that. It needs a plan.
AI STRATEGY. - HOTEL DATA CONFERENCE
Tourism: gives vs takes
There are many discussions these days about the value or tourism and if tourism is net positive etc. While having the discussion is healthy, vilifying tourism for the housing market is a fallacy. NY banned Airbnb and housing prices didn’t go down. Yes we need to find more ways to distribute tourism better, but the long term net positive of tourism is more understanding between cultures. Europeans seeing that Americans are nice people was a recent win for everyone. These happen when tourism grows.
TOURISM BENEFITS

Luxury Hotels as City Builders
One response to tourism is not necessarily fewer travelers but better distribution of travelers. Great hotels can help with that by making less obvious neighborhoods and cities destinations in their own right. Hotels have probably underestimated their ability to shape destination demand. Michelin Guide was an early success in tourism distribution, we can do more.
URBAN LUXURY
Hotel AI Focus ideas
There are now AI tools in most modern hotel software solutions, this makes choosing where to focus harder rather than easier. Revenue management, marketing, guest messaging and operations can all benefit, but adding tools without redesigning workflows probably just creates another layer of software. I think the useful AI projects will increasingly be the boring ones that remove work rather than the impressive ones that generate demos. Productivity first, magic later.
AI IN HOTELS
Trivago as a Seller
Trivago built its identity around comparing hotel sellers, but its own checkout has apparently grown 24x in a year and now ranks among the larger sellers inside its own marketplace. Tripadvisor tried this and dropped it, Google tried it and dropped it. Are they the first to make it work? Also they’re suing Google.
TRIVAGO CHECKOUT
The Middleman Myth
AI travel planning was initially discussed as something that might remove intermediaries (so was the internet) I guess that is the usual myth when some new technology arrives, that it will cut out the middleman. Mindtrip is a good reminder that it might simply create a new generation of them. If an AI planner handles inspiration, itinerary creation and booking but gets hotel inventory through existing OTA relationships, hotels still sit several layers away from the traveler. New interfaces don’t automatically mean new economics.
AI TRAVEL DISTRIBUTION
Travelers are ahead on AI
A study says 54% of travelers have already used AI to plan travel while only 22% of destinations offer an AI trip planner. More interestingly, 29% say an AI recommendation has caused them to change destination. The data is interesting but not absolute. However what is clear is that consumers use AI more than the suppliers do.
AI TRAVEL PLANNING
Expedia and the Booking Moment
Expedia reorganizing technology leadership and it says something interesting about where travel platforms are heading. The booking itself is becoming a smaller piece of their presence. It was the problem they solved when the internet arrived. But that problem has largely been solved. Discovery is going to be the new problem. Booking .com (it seems) is concentrating on more transaction pipes.
EXPEDIA STRATEGY
• Technology Museums Visit - Link
• Where to get inspiration for hospitality - Link⁺
• Weather is Becoming the Location - Link
• The Hotel Yearbook Goes All-In on AI - Link
Did you know: The word "weird" comes from the Old English word "wyrd," which meant "fate" or "destiny." Over time, it changed to describe things that are strange or supernatural, especially because of its use in old stories and plays like Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Defined using Lomar Dictionary⁺