Any marketing content that describes your product - in this case your hotel - must be original, authentic, enticing and believable.

Your marketing content should tell a consistent "story" about your hotel’s value proposition and brand, and inspire travelers to consider and eventually book your property. This is marketing 101.

This rule applies to your website copy and descriptions, OTA and directory listings, social media posts, digital marketing messaging, etc. If it is not, then you are hurting yourself by alienating your prospective guests and sending them to the competition.

Today we are dealing with digitally-savvy, experienced travelers. The prevailing thinking is: If the hotel hasn’t invested in describing well their property, services and amenities so that I feel intrigued and engaged, just imagine what state the property itself is in!

At my company NextGuest we had a team of SEO-trained professional copywriters. When working on the copy for a new hotel website, they visited the hotel/resort and saw all the services and amenities with their own eyes, had discussions with managers there to finetune the hotel branding messaging and style, explored the destination and which places of interest generate business for the hotel, etc.

Our copywriters were de facto storytellers of the hotel story, embedding their own emotions and reminiscing their own experiences, and enhancing the copy with the new branding messaging and style of the property, and of course, optimizing the copy for SEO.

For 20 years we were able to drastically improve the search rankings of our hotel client websites, together with backlink and technical SEO strategies - Google loved the content we created!

So, can hoteliers switch to generative AI-created marketing content using AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Gemini?

At best, genAI comes up with regurgitated, off-the-shelf copy, with no human emotions involved and not understanding sentiment, no personalization for the various key customer segments (corporate, leisure, group, social events, etc.).

And no sense as to what the actual property brand voice is all about, and how hoteliers are positioning their property in their market and vs the competition, and how guests are perceiving on an emotional level the property and its services and amenities.

Here are only a few signs that give away genAI-created content:

• Using complicated, even pompous words and phrases that we humans do not use in our everyday lives.
• Overly structured and predictable sentence length and composition
• Overly uniform tone that is far removed from human emotions
• Easy to spot lack of personality

So, don’t be hasty in firing your digital marketing agency and PR, and replacing them with generative AI-created copywriting.

At least not yet. Not until genAI starts understanding human emotions and acquires personality, which I hope won’t happen in the near future.

Max Starkov
Hospitality & Online Travel Tech Consultant & Strategist

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