There was a time when booking on a hotel brand’s website truly meant something. It meant trust. It meant consistency. It meant a promise delivered. If you chose Hilton, you knew what Hilton stood for. If you picked Marriott, you knew exactly what kind of experience awaited you before you even set foot in the lobby. These brands were not just logos—they were a signal to travelers of a clear, dependable standard of hospitality.
But today, those lines are blurring. Fast.
Earlier this year, for example, Marriott launched its Marriott Media Network—a move that effectively turns its digital assets, from in-room TVs to its mobile app, into ad inventory. Guests can look forward to Beyoncé’s shampoo on their TV screens, Visa’s cross-border fee ads interrupting their Netflix session, or a friendly insurance quote when they try to log into the Wi-Fi.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t guest experience innovation. It’s guest experience monetization. The hospitality industry used to be about crafting a seamless, comfortable, even aspirational stay. Now, some of the biggest brands in the world seem intent on transforming every guest touchpoint into a cash register.
Soft Brands: The Franchise Gold Rush
Meanwhile, the same big groups—Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt, Accor, IHG, Wyndham—are doubling down on their soft brand strategies. Names like Tribute, Autograph, Curio, JdV, Vignette, Voco, The Unbound Collection, and The Handwritten Collection have exploded across the landscape.
Why? Because soft brands scale quickly. They allow hotel groups to rapidly expand their footprint without the heavy lifting of enforcing expensive, uniform brand standards. Instead, they sell access to their distribution infrastructure, their loyalty programs, and their brand halo—without insisting on genuine consistency or quality.
For hotel owners, joining a soft brand can be attractive. It promises independence with global reach. But for guests? It often delivers inconsistency wrapped in a familiar booking funnel.
This is the quiet truth: the legacy hotel “brand” as we once knew it is disappearing. In its place, we see the rise of a platform strategy—a strategy that prioritizes scale, distribution, and monetization over delivering on a unified promise of hospitality.
From Brand to Distribution Platform
Today’s big hotel brands are behaving less like traditional brands and more like distribution platforms. They’re aggregating properties, optimizing yields, cross-selling across sub-brands, and monetizing every guest interaction.
In many ways, they’re beginning to look and act like OTAs. Their homepages increasingly resemble booking engines. Their apps function like marketplaces. The once-clear lines between brand, channel, and platform are dissolving.
This shift risks destroying the very thing that made these brands valuable in the first place: trust, clarity, and emotional connection with the guest. Instead of feeling curated and consistent, these hotel experiences are starting to feel like search engines—impersonal, transactional, and interchangeable.
From Guest-Centric to Money-Centric
We should call this trend what it is: a shift from guest-centricity to money-centricity.
Today’s brand priorities are clear. The real KPIs aren’t about delighting guests or delivering exceptional stays. Instead, they focus on digital revenue per user, cross-brand conversions, owned-channel monetization, soft brand sign-ups, and distribution dominance.
Guest experience has been reframed. It’s no longer the product itself. It’s the surface from which brands extract incremental revenue—through ads, upsells, data harvesting, and tech integration.
The hotel stay—the sanctuary that should offer comfort, rest, and hospitality—risks becoming just another dashboard designed to maximize lifetime value and quarterly returns.
The Quiet Collapse of Brand Standards
To grow faster, brands have loosened the standards that once defined them. Soft brands promise the best of both worlds—“independent spirit with global scale.” But in practice? The results are often underwhelming.
One Hilton property might feel like an exquisitely designed urban boutique. The next might be a tired suburban conference hotel with outdated carpet and under-trained staff. One Autograph Collection hotel might surprise and delight. Another might leave you wondering how it earned the badge at all.
This is the fundamental problem: when “brand” is allowed to mean everything, it ends up meaning nothing. Guests no longer know what they’re buying when they see the flag on the booking page.
Hospitality Partners or Platform Clients?
This shift doesn’t just impact guests—it also changes what it means to be a hotel owner within a large brand.
There was a time when joining a global hotel group was a strategic alignment: operationally, experientially, philosophically. Today, more often than not, it means becoming a tech and distribution customer. Franchisees aren’t just paying for the sign over their door. They’re paying for access to loyalty networks, distribution channels, upsell tools, ad systems, self-check-in apps, and revenue management platforms—often with mandatory fees and unclear ROI.
Hotel groups have become less hospitality partners and more software vendors—selling a bundle of digital services that, arguably, serve the brand’s earnings more than the owner’s profitability or the guest’s experience.
Nobody Planned This. and That’s the Problem
Here’s the thing: I don’t believe any of the major brands sat down one day and said: Let’s become OTAs.
This didn’t happen by design. It happened by drift: step-by-step, tool-by-tool, and incentive-by-incentive.
First came dynamic pricing systems, followed by cross-brand merchandising. Loyalty programs shifted from genuine guest recognition to pure retention mechanics. Next came ads, sponsored listings, paid upgrades. Today, the brand’s own website is indistinguishable from an OTA. The app is a marketplace. The so-called “direct” experience feels anything but that.
This isn’t a strategic vision, but rather a slow surrender to the incentives that reward short-term growth over long-term brand identity. And most guests can no longer tell if they’re booking with a hotel brand or a generic distribution channel.
Challenger Brands Don’t Chase Mass. They Cultivate Fans.
While legacy hotel brands drift toward platform-ification, we’re seeing the rise of a new generation of challenger brands across other industries, and they’re showing us a different path that boutique hotels can replicate.
Just take a look at Skims in fashion, or Glossier in beauty, and Olipop in beverages. These brands aren’t trying to be everything to everyone. They’re not obsessed with mass distribution or maximizing every monetizable touchpoint. Instead, they’re focused on building real connections, they’re direct-to-consumer, community-powered, and voice-driven.
They care deeply about how they show up, not just where. They don’t need 10,000 stores or properties. They need the right 1,000 fans.
They win on identity, intimacy, and loyalty earned without gimmicks. And in doing so, they remind us what legacy hospitality brands seem to have forgotten: real brand value comes from meaning, not from scale alone.
Lessons for Boutique Hotels
Boutique hotels, already renowned for delivering unique and personalized hospitality during the stay, can do the same online. Instead of chasing scale at the expense of experience, boutiques can focus on knowing exactly who their guest is and delivering something unique, personal, and meaningful from the moment guests discover their hotel’s digital storefront.
You see this mastered by boutique hotels and groups from Copenhagen’s Hotel Sanders that delivers calm luxury and a rooftop bar that feels like a secret garden, to AlmaLusa Hotels that brings Portugal’s Lusitanian heritage to life across every property in Lisbon and the Alentejo, to the Hotel Okura in Amsterdam that celebrates centuries-old ties between Japan and the Netherlands, to Key West Cottages in Virginia that targets adventure-seekers and nature-lovers with a host of outdoor activities from lake paddling to forest trails and beach explorations.
These hotels don’t treat their websites like generic funnels—they use them to tell a story. They don’t blast mass offers—they craft tailored experiences their guests actually want.
That’s the opportunity: in a world full of choice, guests don’t want more options—they want better ones. For boutique hotels willing to focus on identity, intimacy, and true hospitality, you are in the best position to meet this demand.
The Field Is Wide Open for Independent Hotels
Ironically, the drift of big hotel brands has left a gap in the market—an opening for new, boutique, meaningful brands to emerge.
There is space today for hospitality companies willing to trade massive scale for souls. Space for brands that treat technology as an enabler, not the product itself. Space for those who believe that a hotel can—and should—be more than just real estate optimized for yield.
This is a call to anyone in the industry: let’s build brands that stand for the guest-experience again. Let’s deliver on the promise of hospitality—rooms that comfort, teams that genuinely care, experiences that linger in memory. Because in a world overflowing with choice, what travelers crave isn’t more options. They crave more meaning.
About GuestCentric
GuestCentric is a leading provider of cloud-based digital marketing software and services that help extraordinary hoteliers promote their brand, drive direct bookings and connect with customers on all digital platforms. GuestCentric’s all-in-one platform provides hotels with the only unified solution for managing their guests’ online journey: award-winning, high impact websites; an integrated, easy-to-use booking engine; social media marketing and publishing tools; a GDS chain code and a channel manager to offer rooms on Amadeus, Booking.com, Expedia, Galileo, Google, Sabre, TripAdvisor and hundreds of other channels. GuestCentric is a proud provider of solutions that maximize direct bookings to hotel groups and independent hotels from collections such as Design Hotels, Great Hotels of the World, Leading Hotels of the World, Relais & Chateaux, Small Luxury Hotels and Small Danish Hotels. GuestCentric is featured on Skift Travel Tech 250, a list of the top 250 travel tech companies shaping the modern-day travel experience.
Melissa Rodrigues
Content Manager
+35 196 157 3854
GuestCentric Systems
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