DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES IN PROMOTING HOTEL BUSINESSES

This article examines how digital marketing strategies can be configured to promote hotel enterprises in a market shaped by platform intermediation, accelerating automation, and shifting guest expectations. The relevance lies in the structural transition from intermediary-led discovery to data-centric direct relationships, where booking engines, mobile applications, and conversational interfaces act not only as points of sale but as orchestrators of the entire guest journey. The discussion frames digital and classical marketing as complementary rather than competing logics: paid and organic visibility, metasearch and brand search, social storytelling and community engagement, are aligned with brand-building touchpoints and locality-based partnerships to create a coherent path from attention to transaction and return. Particular attention is paid to the strategic role of artificial intelligence in pricing, content creation, and real-time assistance; to the integration of revenue management with websites, internet booking engines, and channel managers; and to the governance of first-party data through CRM/CDP architectures that enable personalization while respecting privacy and public rate parity. The article explores how hotels can redesign funnels around incremental value, using clear decision rules for segmentation, dynamic packaging, and post-stay communications, and how trigger-based automation can be embedded without eroding brand trust. It also considers operational constraints that shape adoption, including legacy property systems and API limitations, the economics of acquisition across channels, organizational capabilities in content operations, and heterogeneous guest attitudes toward AI that influence creative choices and the mix of human versus automated service. The analysis delineates questions of sequencing and prioritization – what to deploy first when resources are scarce; how to calibrate direct and intermediary channels without sacrificing visibility; which metrics best capture net contribution to room revenue and lifetime value; and how to attribute lift across overlapping media in a way that is defensible for budget allocation. Segment-specific pathways are outlined for different tiers of the market, recognizing that premium brands often pursue fine-grained value segmentation and omnichannel bundling, while midscale and economy properties may initially target efficiency gains in content and automation with a pragmatic capital profile.