Turning guest insights into a direct booking pilot for an upscale hotel

CAMBRIA HOTEL BOSTON DOWNTOWN SEAPORT

Business Need
Revenue had grown steadily since 2024, but hotel leadership saw a costly pattern beneath that growth: too many reservations were coming through online travel agencies which charged a high commissions rate. The goal was to increase direct bookings, but the hotel first needed to understand which guests had a reason to book directly, and where that opportunity was being missed.

The Space Between
The clues were scattered. Reservation data, customer insights, reviews, and financial results lived in different systems, each with its own reporting limits. Some guest details were available for only a short window of time, while other records could only be exported in small monthly increments. For a small leadership team with limited bandwidth, seeing the whole guest journey meant piecing together information by hand. The reports showed booking patterns, but they could not explain what guests valued about their stays.

Working in System
To understand the experience beyond the numbers, reservation and channel data were contextualized through conversations with guests, front desk associates, and rooms staff. That fuller picture helped narrow the opportunity to loyalty members, repeat transient guests, and business travel groups. Those findings shaped additional marketing pilots to connect engagement with the stay itself through a personal outreach campaign to high value guests.

Impact
The campaign generated more than $12,000 in revenue across 18 bookings for less than $100 in additional spend by the hotel. It also gave the hotel a clearer starting point for future booking efforts: specific guests, reasons to return, and a way to measure the response.