At some point in the last few years, your hotel signed a contract with a marketing agency. Maybe it was for SEO. Maybe paid media. Maybe a full-service digital retainer. The invoice comes every month. The reports come every month. And every month, somewhere between reading the report and approving the invoice, a question forms that rarely gets asked out loud:

Is this actually working?

Not working in the sense of activity happening. The activity is always happening. Reports are being generated. Campaigns are running. Rankings are moving. Impressions are accumulating. Something is always happening.

Working in the sense that matters to an owner: is this driving revenue?

That question — asked directly, with the expectation of a direct answer — is one of the most valuable things a hotel owner can do for their bottom line. It is also one of the least common conversations happening in hotel marketing relationships right now.

Why Agency Accountability Is Rare In Hospitality

Hotel marketing agency relationships tend to follow a predictable pattern. An agency is hired, usually based on a compelling pitch and a client list. The first few months involve setup, strategy decks, and onboarding. Reports begin arriving. The metrics look reasonable. Nobody wants to disrupt a relationship that seems to be functioning.

Then the relationship ages. The agency becomes comfortable. Reporting becomes routine. The metrics that get highlighted are the ones that look good — traffic trends, impression volumes, ranking improvements. The metrics that are harder to explain — cost per acquisition, direct booking conversion rate, return on ad spend relative to revenue — receive less emphasis.

The hotel side of the relationship rarely has someone with the expertise to interrogate these reports meaningfully. The GM is managing a hotel. The revenue manager is focused on rate and occupancy. The owner is watching the overall financial picture. Nobody is in the room whose specific job is to evaluate whether the agency is earning what they are being paid.

The agency keeps billing. The hotel keeps paying. The question keeps not getting asked.

What Accountability Actually Looks Like

Holding a hotel marketing agency accountable does not mean being adversarial. It means establishing clear performance expectations at the start of the relationship and measuring against them consistently.

The metrics that should matter in any hotel marketing engagement:

Return on ad spend by channel. For every dollar spent on Google, Meta, Sojern, or any other paid channel, what revenue did that channel generate? Not impressions. Not clicks. Not traffic. Revenue. A well-run Google Search campaign for a hotel should be generating somewhere between 15 and 30 dollars in direct booking revenue for every dollar of ad spend. If your agency cannot tell you this number with confidence, that is the first accountability gap.

Direct booking conversion rate. Of all the travelers who visit your hotel website, what percentage complete a direct booking? Industry benchmarks vary by property type and market, but most hotel websites convert somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of visitors. If your rate is significantly below that and your agency has not identified it as a priority, that is the second accountability gap.

Cost per direct booking acquisition. What does it cost, in total marketing spend, to generate one direct booking? This number should be trending down over time as campaigns optimize and brand recognition builds. If it is trending up or staying flat while spend increases, that requires explanation.

Direct booking percentage of total revenue. As discussed in our OTA commission post, the share of revenue coming from direct bookings is one of the most important indicators of marketing effectiveness and margin health. A marketing agency that is not tracking and reporting this number is not aligned with the owner's actual financial interests.

The Reporting Gap

Most hotel marketing agencies report on what they control. An SEO agency reports on rankings and organic traffic. A paid media agency reports on click-through rates and campaign performance. A social media agency reports on followers and engagement.

What none of these reports typically show is the complete revenue picture — how all of these channels work together to drive or fail to drive direct bookings and total revenue growth.

This is not necessarily bad faith on the agency's part. It is a structural problem. Each agency sees its slice of the marketing picture. Nobody except the owner has visibility into the whole thing. And the owner, most of the time, does not have the expertise to synthesize what multiple agency reports are actually telling them.

The result is a hotel that is paying for marketing activity without anyone truly accountable for marketing outcomes.

Questions Every Owner Should Be Asking

These are the questions worth asking in your next agency review:

What was our direct booking revenue this period compared to the same period last year? And what specifically did your work contribute to that number?

What is our current cost per direct booking acquisition and how has it changed since we started working together?

What is our return on ad spend by channel and how does that compare to industry benchmarks for our property type?

What is our direct booking percentage of total revenue and what is your strategy to improve it?

If you asked these questions today and your agency could not answer them with confidence and specific data, you have your answer about whether the relationship is working.

What Good Agency Accountability Looks Like

The goal is not to fire your agency. It is to have a relationship where performance expectations are clear, reporting is focused on revenue outcomes rather than activity metrics, and there is a senior voice in the relationship capable of evaluating what the data actually means.

That senior voice is what most hotels are missing. The agency works for the agency. The revenue manager works on rate and occupancy. The GM works on the operation. Nobody is working specifically on making sure that the marketing investment is returning revenue at the level it should.

Filling that gap — with someone whose incentives are aligned with the owner's financial outcomes — is what changes the relationship between a hotel and its marketing spend from a cost center to a revenue driver.

The question is not whether your agency is doing work. They almost certainly are. The question is whether that work is earning what you are paying for it. That question deserves a real answer.

Escalante IQ is a tech-enabled hotel revenue firm working with ownership groups and management companies to drive direct revenue, reduce OTA dependency, and hold every marketing dollar accountable to the number. Referral only. Selective by design. escalanteiq.com

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