Hospitality: Re-Acquiring Your Own Guests

Illustrative engagement — a composite of how we work, not a named client.

Paying a middleman for guests you already had

A boutique property with strong reviews and heavy dependence on online travel agencies. Guests who had already stayed were being re-acquired through the same platforms that had introduced them, at full commission, every time.

The two-part problem

The first part is acquisition: paid and organic work built specifically around the moment a guest searches the property by name, where a booking should never be paid for twice. The second part is ownership: a direct booking path good enough to be worth choosing, and a reason for a past guest to come back to it.

The lifecycle half

Every past guest is a list the property already owns and had never systematically contacted. Post-stay sequences, a genuine reason to return before the season they usually book, and messaging on the channel that market actually uses — which for this audience meant WhatsApp alongside email.

What we measured

Direct bookings as a share of total, month over month
Effective commission rate across all channels blended
Repeat guest rate and time between stays
Revenue per available room against the same period last year

Retention is not the soft, later-stage part of a plan. It decides how aggressive you are allowed to be everywhere else, because it decides what a customer is worth.

How we build lifecycle programmes