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Skayle Marketing

Hospitality & Food Service

Marketing for restaurants, venues and hospitality groups

A table that goes empty tonight cannot be sold tomorrow. Hospitality marketing is mostly the work of moving demand into the hours you cannot fill, and of keeping the commission-taking middlemen from owning your customer.

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The category

What these businesses have in common

Hospitality has an economic feature almost no other sector shares: the inventory expires nightly. Everything about how the marketing should work follows from that, including the parts that look counterintuitive.

It is also the category most thoroughly intermediated at the point of purchase. Aggregators, booking platforms and map results sit between the venue and the guest, and each of them takes something — a commission, the customer relationship, or the ability to speak to that person again.

The result is a discipline that is less about generating demand than about redirecting it: into the empty sessions, away from the commission channels, and towards the guests who come back without being paid for twice.

Shared ground

What holds true across the sector

  • Capacity is fixed and it perishes. A table, a room or a seat that goes unsold tonight cannot be added to tomorrow's inventory, which makes an empty slot a permanent loss rather than deferred revenue.
  • A commission-taking intermediary stands between the business and a large share of its customers. Delivery aggregators, booking platforms and travel agents deliver genuine discovery and take a meaningful cut of every transaction they touch, including ones the venue had already earned.
  • Reviews function as the product description rather than as a trust signal. Nobody can taste the food or see the room before arriving, so the rating and the recent comments carry the weight that photographs and specifications carry elsewhere.
  • Marketing is limited by operations in a way most sectors are not. Filling a session the kitchen cannot staff produces a bad night, a bad review and a customer who does not return, so demand generation has to be planned against what the business can actually deliver.
  • The decision is frequently made within minutes and within a short distance. Proximity, whether you are open, and what the photographs look like settle a large share of hospitality choices before anything else is considered.

Where they split

And where a single strategy stops working

These differences are the reason the pages below are written separately rather than as one page with the business type swapped out.

  • The booking horizon differs by an order of magnitude. A meal is often decided under an hour before it happens, while a hotel stay or an event booking is researched weeks or months ahead, and the two need entirely different search and content work.
  • The intermediaries are not the same and do not behave the same. A delivery aggregator takes a commission on food that leaves the building; a booking platform influences whether anyone arrives at all. The strategies for reducing dependence on each are different.
  • Single sites and groups have opposite structural problems. An independent has to be findable at all; a group has to stop its venues competing with each other in search and keep a dozen sets of hours, menus and listings accurate at once.
  • Some hospitality demand can be created and some can only be moved. A destination venue can attract people who were not going out; a lunch trade in an office district is competing for a fixed number of people who were always going to eat somewhere nearby.

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Where to go next

Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal

Written so far

Industry pages in this sector

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