How Hotels and Resorts Should Market With Content in 2026

Every January I get the same call, a property has just looked at last year's numbers and realized that OTA commissions quietly ate something like 15 to 20 percent of their room revenue, and ad costs crept up another notch, and now they want to know what changed and what they should do differently, and my honest answer about how hotels and resorts should market with content in 2026 is that the fundamentals did not change at all, what changed is that the cost of ignoring them got a lot more obvious, right.

I run a boutique distribution agency for founders and creators, and hospitality is one of the niches where the gap between properties that get this and properties that do not is the widest I see anywhere, so let me lay out how I would actually approach it, as the operator who has to make the math work.

How hotels and resorts should market with content in 2026, the short version

The short version of how hotels and resorts should market with content in 2026 is this, you stop treating content as a thing you do when you remember to, and you start treating it as a flywheel, one proper production a month at the property turns into 30 or more platform-native assets, those assets get distributed everywhere your future guests already are, and because they keep getting discovered for months they keep pulling in warm, direct, low-commission bookings long after you posted them, right.

The reason this is the answer in 2026 specifically is that discovery has shifted hard toward video and toward search-inside-the-platform, people plan trips by searching directly in TikTok and Instagram and YouTube now, not only on Google, and a property that is not showing up natively inside those apps is invisible at the exact moment the trip is being dreamed up.

Where your guests actually are in 2026

Let me be specific about channels, because "do social media" is useless advice and I refuse to give it. Here is how I would split a property's attention this year.

The job column is the important one, because each channel is catching a different buyer at a different moment, and the wedding planner on Pinterest is a completely different human from the corporate events buyer on LinkedIn, and you cannot serve both with the same caption, right. If you want to sanity-check posting cadence against real data the team at Sprout Social publishes solid benchmarks every year, and for the planning-mindset channels the scheduling folks at Buffer have good breakdowns of what consistency actually buys you.

What to shoot so it actually works

The single biggest mistake I see is properties shooting beautiful but useless footage, fifteen drone shots of the roof and nothing a guest can picture themselves inside of, right. So when I plan a shoot day I am thinking about the cutdowns before the camera comes out, and I want footage that answers the questions guests actually have.

• Real suite reveals, walking in the door the way a guest would, not a static wide shot
• The breakfast and the F and B, because food sells rooms more than anyone admits
• The path to the beach or the pool, the stuff people worry about when comparing
• A meeting or event space staged two ways, social and corporate
• Staff being real humans, because trust is built by faces, not facades
• Golden hour exteriors for the dream-bait, but rationed, not the whole edit

The footage that books rooms is the footage that lets a guest pre-live the stay, drone shots impress other marketers, suite reveals book the room.

How one shoot becomes a month of distribution

So here is how the economics work in practice, one production day at the property feeds the entire month, and that is the only way the cadence in that table above is even survivable for a property that is not a big chain with a content team, right. A single day of shooting, planned properly, gives you the 8 to 10 vertical videos, the carousels, the dozen-plus pins, the long YouTube tour and its clips, and the email stills, and you batch-schedule the lot so the property is publishing daily without anyone scrambling daily.

Google has documented for years how travel decisions sprawl across weeks of dreaming, planning and booking, and you can read their framing of that journey at Think with Google, and the practical consequence for 2026 is that you need to be present across that whole stretch, not just blast an ad at the booking moment, because by the booking moment the decision is mostly made.

The metric that actually matters

Vanity metrics will lie to you all day, so the number I anchor every property to is direct-booking share, the percentage of room nights that come through your own site at zero commission versus through an OTA at 15 to 18 percent. When the flywheel is running right, that share climbs quarter over quarter, and on a property doing say 12,000 room nights a year at a 280 dollar average rate, moving even ten points of that from OTA to direct is roughly 50,000 to 60,000 dollars of recovered commission a year, which pays for the entire content program several times over, right.

That is the framing I bring to the finance side, content is not a cost center, it is the cheapest channel you have once it is compounding, and the whole point of distributing one shoot 30 ways is that the cost per booking keeps falling.

Content does the deciding before the booking page

At the end of the day the reason this works is that content does the trust-building before the booking, so by the time a guest lands on your rate page they are not a cold price-shopper comparing four anonymous properties, they have already watched your rooms, seen your staff, felt the place, and basically decided, and warm guests convert at a multiple of cold ones and they ask for far fewer discounts.

So if you are wondering how hotels and resorts should market with content in 2026, that is it, one shoot a month, 30-plus platform-native assets, steady distribution across the channels your buyers actually use, and a relentless focus on growing direct-booking share. That is exactly what I would build for your property, and if you want to see it mapped to your specific rooms and your specific season, book a demo at /boutique-agency/contact.

So yeah. That's my way of saying it.