Hotels get pitched constantly. Booking platforms, channel managers, review tools, photographers and "growth" agencies all write to the same front desk inbox. Your email lands next to theirs, often read by a receptionist between check-ins. Winning this market means understanding how a hotel actually earns money and sounding like you already do.
How a hotel thinks about money
A hotel sells a perishable product. An empty room tonight is revenue gone forever. That shapes every buying decision:
- Direct bookings vs. commission. Rooms booked through online travel agencies cost the hotel a commission. Anything that moves guests to book on the hotel's own website is easy to value, so pitch it in those terms.
- Occupancy and rate. Owners and managers watch how full they are and what they charge per night. Help with either and you are speaking their language.
- Reviews drive bookings. Ratings on Google and travel sites affect whether a guest clicks. Reputation work is a real need, not a nice extra.
- Shoulder and off seasons. The quiet months are where most hotels feel pain. Filling midweek or off-season rooms is a concrete goal you can attach a service to.
Avoid talking about "brand awareness" in the abstract. Talk about booked nights.
What hotels actually buy from outside providers
Independent and small group hotels tend to outsource work they cannot staff full time:
- Website redesigns focused on the booking engine and mobile experience
- Professional photography and video of rooms, food and surroundings
- Google Business Profile management and local SEO
- Paid search and social campaigns for direct bookings
- Review response and reputation management
- Email marketing to past guests (return stays, off-season offers)
- Event and wedding marketing for properties with function space
- Multilingual content for international guests
Pick one or two of these and lead with them. A hotel manager trusts a specialist more than an agency that lists twenty services.
Who decides
This depends heavily on size and ownership:
- Small independent hotels, guesthouses, B&Bs: the owner decides, often while running daily operations. Short, direct emails work.
- Mid-size independents: a general manager handles most decisions, with the owner approving bigger spend. Some have a sales and marketing manager or revenue manager.
- Branded or franchised hotels: marketing is often dictated by the brand. Your opening is usually smaller: local events, photography, or the hotel restaurant. Many agencies skip these and focus on independents.
If you can find a named GM or owner, write to them. Generic reservations addresses are worth trying but expect your email to be forwarded, so make it easy to forward: one clear point, one clear ask.
Timing around the seasons
Hotels plan ahead of their busy periods and are hardest to reach during them. A sensible rule of thumb:
- Reach out during the quiet season. Managers have time to think, and the pain of empty rooms is fresh.
- Pitch marketing work a few months before peak season, so campaigns and photos are ready in time.
- Avoid peak weeks and major holidays. A beach resort in July or a ski lodge in February is not reading cold email.
- Budget planning often happens near year end for the following year, which can be a good time for larger retainers.
Know your target region's seasons before you send. A city business hotel and a coastal resort have very different calendars.
Finding hotels on Google Maps
Google Maps is the most complete public directory of hotels, including small ones with no presence on large platforms. Useful search terms:
- "boutique hotel", "independent hotel", "hotel"
- "bed and breakfast", "guest house", "inn"
- "resort", "lodge", "country house hotel"
- "serviced apartments", "aparthotel"
- "wedding venue hotel" if you sell event marketing
In GetClient you can run several of these keywords across multiple cities or towns in one search, and each lead comes back with the business name, category, website, phone, any emails found and, where public, the owner's name with a confidence score. Running overlapping keywords will produce duplicates, so dedupe your lead list before sending, and sort leads into folders by region or property type so each campaign stays relevant.
What makes a good hotel prospect
Scan the results and prioritise hotels showing a fixable problem you can name:
- An outdated website, slow on mobile, or a booking button that sends guests to a third-party site
- Dark, low-quality or few photos on their Google listing
- Plenty of reviews but no owner responses, or recent unanswered complaints
- A decent rating but a small number of reviews
- Event space or a restaurant that their site barely mentions
- Independent ownership, so the decision maker is reachable
One specific observation in your email is worth more than any amount of personalisation tokens.
A sample cold email
Keep it short. Here is one for an agency selling direct-booking websites:
Subject: direct bookings at {{params.name}}
Hi {{params.firstname}},
I was looking at {{params.website}} and noticed the Book Now button takes guests to an external site before they see your rates. Every one of those bookings likely carries a commission you could keep.
I build booking-focused websites for independent hotels in {{params.city}} and nearby. Would it help if I sent a short video showing two or three changes I'd make to yours?
Either way, good luck with the season.
[Your name]
Replace the observation with whatever is true for that hotel. If you send to a whole list, group hotels sharing the same problem so the line stays honest. For more angles, see these cold email templates for marketing agencies.
A sensible follow-up
Hotel inboxes are busy, so one email is rarely enough. Two or three follow-ups spaced several days apart is a reasonable rule of thumb:
- Day 3 or 4: a short nudge with one new detail, such as a note about their photos or reviews.
- About a week later: offer something useful with no strings, like a quick list of three fixes.
- A final note: say you will not follow up again and leave the door open for next season.
In GetClient's flow builder you can branch on whether the first email was opened: send hotels that opened a different follow-up from those that did not. Open tracking is not perfectly reliable, so keep both versions sensible on their own. Expect out-of-office replies during busy periods and handle them by pausing and retrying later.
Before sending, verify the list and check your setup with the Gmail sending setup checklist. Include an unsubscribe option and check the email marketing rules that apply where you and your recipients are; this is not legal advice. New GetClient accounts start with free credits, and details are on the pricing page.