Why the "Right Guest" Is a Two-for-One Win
The single biggest pitfall in hotel marketing is the belief that you must "serve everyone." The moment you decide to be the hotel for everybody, you guarantee generic messaging, attract price-shoppers, and doom your team to an unwinnable war competing on price. You end up attracting guests who will never be truly satisfied or profitable.
When you pivot from this "all things to all people" approach to attracting a specific, defined target audience, you simultaneously win on two fronts: Guest Satisfaction and Productivity.
The Guest Satisfaction Win
When you attract the right guest, they arrive happier and leave happier.
- Relevance from the First Click: Your messaging, visuals, and offers align perfectly with their reason for travel. The prospect immediately feels, "This hotel gets me. This is for me."
- Built-in Expectation Alignment: You deliver exactly what you promised because you built the promise for them. This alignment is the silver bullet for cutting complaints and boosting your NPS and online reviews.
- Stronger Pricing Power: The guest's "willingness to pay" increases dramatically. Why? Because your hotel is no longer just a random room, it's the perfect solution for their specific mission. You stop competing on price and start competing on value.
The Productivity (Profit) Win
This is where the strategy pays for itself. Attracting the right guest is more efficient.
- Dramatically Lower CAC: You stop wasting money trying to attract "anyone" and invest your budget only in "your" ideal guest. Your ad spend becomes an investment, not an expense.
- A More Efficient Funnel: This high-quality, high-intent traffic converts faster on your booking engine, reducing your reliance on costly discounts and OTA commissions.
- Clarity and Operational Focus: Your entire team—from housekeeping to the front desk—can perfect the services that matter most to this specific audience. This focus creates a cleaner P&L flow-through and higher margins.
The bottom line is this: Focused attraction is not "narrowing the market"; it is "choosing profit."
It means delighting the guests you were built for while eliminating the massive waste, time, and cost associated with chasing the ones you are not.
The Only Principle: Define Your IGP Before You Spend €1
Here is the iron rule of the Attract stage: If you haven't decided who you want to win, every campaign, image, and offer is guesswork.
Your entire commercial strategy rests on this foundation. Before you buy an ad, write a blog post, or approve a promotion, you must first define your Ideal Guest Profile (IGP).
An IGP is not a vague demographic, such as "millennials" or "families." It's a clear, recognizable profile of the guest your hotel is perfectly designed to serve—a profile your entire team can understand, recognize, and design for.
To do this, you must go beyond basic trip details and use the F-E-S Lens to understand their true motivations.
- Functional (F): This is the reason for the trip, the logistical needs. What must-haves do they have? What are their constraints? (e.g., budget, must-have amenities like strong Wi-Fi, parking, or a pet-friendly room, proximity to a conference center).
- Emotional (E): This is the feeling they are chasing or trying to avoid. What is their desired emotional state? (e.g., a sense of escape and calm, a feeling of status and recognition, the efficiency of a frictionless trip, or removing the stress of travel).
- Social (S): This refers to the identity they are fulfilling and the connections they are forming. Who are they on this trip? (e.g., a couple bonding, a solo traveler seeking discovery, a manager building team cohesion during an offsite, a family creating memories).
When you see your guest through the F-E-S lens, you can stop being vague and start being viable.
VAGUE: "We target leisure guests and business travelers." (This is useless. It tells your team nothing and leads to generic marketing.)
VIABLE IGP 1: "The 'Two-Night Couples' Escape' from within a 3-hour drive, focused on spa access and in-house fine dining. They are seeking escape (Emotional) and bonding (Social)."
VIABLE IGP 2: "The 'Weeknight Business Traveler' visiting the financial district. They require frictionless sleep, fast Wi-Fi, and a quick, high-quality breakfast (Functional) to maximize efficiency (Emotional)."
Once you have these one-sentence definitions, everything changes. You now have a filter for every commercial decision you make.
The 3 Key Activities to Win the "Attract" Stage
Once you have your IGP, you can execute. Winning the Attract stage comes down to three key activities.
1. Define Your USP (and Prove It with Reviews)
Your Ideal Guest Profile tells you who to talk to; your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is what you say. It's the one-line promise that connects your hotel's strengths directly to the IGP's F-E-S needs.
But in a world of endless marketing fluff, a promise is not enough. You must prove it.
Back up your USP with "proof pillars", objective, tangible evidence. The most powerful proof you have is the voice of your past guests. Curate guest reviews and user-generated content (UGC) that explicitly validate your claims.
- USP: "The most frictionless stay for business travelers in the financial district."
- Proof Pillar: A review snippet on your website that says, "Check-in was seamless, the Wi-Fi was the fastest I've ever used, and the 6 AM breakfast was perfect."
2. Build a Content Engine That Helps, Not Just Sells
Stop publishing generic content about your destination that any hotel could copy. Your content must be an extension of your hospitality, helping your IGP imagine their success with you.
If your IGP is the "Two-Night Couples' Escape," they don't need a generic list of "Top 10 Museums." They need "The Ultimate 48-Hour Romantic Itinerary," with your spa, your restaurant, and your partner experiences at the center.
Create segment-specific landing pages and itineraries that speak directly to their F-E-S needs. This builds trust and authority long before they are ready to make a booking.
3. Target Precisely (and Stop Wasting Money)
This is where you reap the rewards of your hard work. Instead of wasting your budget spraying your generic message to "everyone," you can now deliver your specific promise, with proof, only to the people who are most likely to value it.
Target your distribution by leveraging their feeder markets, specific search keywords ("romantic getaway with spa"), and online behaviors.
Here is your final litmus test for any "Attract" activity: "Would a qualified prospect immediately know, 'This hotel is for me,' within 5 seconds of seeing your ad or homepage?"
If the answer is no, you're still stuck in the transactional trap.
Conclusion: Stop Serving Everyone. Start Choosing Profit.
The lazy, transactional hotelier competes on price. The innovative, profitable hotelier competes on fit.
Attracting the right guest is not a "marketing trick"; it is the foundation for the entire Guest Journey. When you get the Attract stage right, everything else becomes easier and more profitable:
- Your Capture stage converts faster at a higher ADR.
- Your Prepare stage sees higher attach rates for relevant upsells.
- Your Deliver stage is smoother because guest expectations are already aligned.
- Your Review stage generates the powerful social proof you need to fuel the cycle all over again.
Before you approve your next marketing budget, ask your team this one simple question:
"Have we clearly defined, in one sentence, who we are for?"
If the answer is "everyone," you've already lost.
