Your sales team and business development reps are doing everything right—hand-crafting personalised cold emails and checking their analytics diligently. Yet, corporate booking momentum is stalling because reply rates are plummeting across the board. The problem isn’t your value proposition; it’s that modern AI spam filters are treating automated sales templates and unverified prospecting lists as hostile threats

Because AI filters now cross-reference text patterns to spot automated sales playbooks, repetitive pitches to corporate bookers and event planners face immediate blocks. Operating with out-of-date or unverified prospect data doesn’t just waste your sales team’s time—it damages your domain reputation enough to interrupt the crucial emails needed to confirm corporate hotel bookings, private dining reservations, and large-scale food service contracts.

In this edition of Hospitality Marketing Insight, we explore why AI spam detection is more stringent than ever, and why standard business development playbooks are triggering immediate server rejections. We will break down how automated warm-up services leave behind technical footprints that can get your entire domain banned by Google and Microsoft email servers, and why direct messages on social media could replace the inbox.

📄 On the Menu

• Email Deliverability in 2026

• Understanding Sender Reputation

• The Danger of Warm-Up Services

• Why Social DMs are the New Inbox

Let’s Check In ☕

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📥 Email Deliverability in 2026

There is nothing more frustrating than watching your sales team hand-craft highly targeted outreach to event planners and corporate bookers, only to be met with complete silence. So why is this happening?

Google and Microsoft have recently rolled out advanced AI-powered spam filters that heavily analyse incoming messages, causing cold email reply rates to plummet. These stringent filter updates are reducing open rates to record lows, with some service businesses reporting that their open rates plummeted from 35% to 8% almost overnight.

A major cause of email marketing failure right now is the degradation of data quality, which has caused bounce rates to spike to 13% for some.

🏀 Bounce Rates

Google and Microsoft have a 2% bounce rate as their strict danger threshold. Exceeding this triggers immediate “550 5.7.515” server rejections from Microsoft, while Google starts throttling your delivery speeds or dropping your emails straight into spam folders across their entire network. So what are bounces?

• Hard Bounce - Permanent Error
  This means that the email address does not exist or has been permanently deleted. AI filters consider a high number of hard bounces a sign that you are using purchased, unverified, or outdated lists.

• Soft Bounce - Temporary Error
  This occurs when the email address is real, but the message cannot be delivered right now because the person’s inbox is full or their server is temporarily down. If you try to send to an address that soft-bounces 3 times in a row, the AI automatically treats it as a hard bounce and lowers your reputation.

If your bounce rates are usually around 1.8% or 1.9%, that puts you one bad list segment away from an automated penalty. Because filters have tightened, reputable senders must aim to keep total bounces below 1% to stay entirely safe.

🛑 Do Not Buy Lists

Unscrupulous vendors sell scraped, recycled databases that are heavily decayed. Not only is this illegal, but they often contain dead corporate accounts and hidden spam traps.

Spam traps are inactive email addresses turned into digital tripwires by network providers specifically to catch unconsented senders. They act as monitoring tools across the internet, operating in two primary ways:

Pristine Spam Traps: These are brand-new email addresses created by inbox providers that have never belonged to a real person. They are deliberately planted on public web pages. Because they have never opted into any communications, the only way they end up on an outbound sales list is via automated data scraping software. Hitting just one of these can instantly blacklist your company’s domain.

Recycled Spam Traps: These are old, abandoned corporate email accounts—such as a former procurement manager, hotel operations lead, or event coordinator—that providers deactivate and later repurpose as fraud detectors. If your sales team continues pitching to an old prospect list that hasn’t been verified in years, hitting these recycled addresses signals to AI filters that your data is heavily decayed, tanking your sender reputation

Launching unverified outbound sequences to old, inactive prospect lists can trigger spam spikes so severe that they blackhole your entire domain. When this happens, it doesn’t just stop your sales pitches; it blocks your company’s regular, day-to-day emails.

Imagine your event coordinators being unable to send out venue contracts, your booking system failing to deliver hotel reservation confirmations, or your procurement team being cut off entirely from food service suppliers because your network is flagged as hostile!

These operational nightmares aren’t just hypothetical IT headaches—they are the direct consequences of a damaged digital footprint. When your network is flagged as hostile, it means mailbox providers have judged your sending domain or IP address and found it lacking. To prevent these catastrophic delivery failures and ensure your critical business communications always reach their destination, you must first understand the invisible metric governing it all: sender reputation.

Every time your business sends an email, it undergoes a silent, instantaneous evaluation. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and mailbox managers act as digital gatekeepers, deciding whether your message deserves a prominent spot in the inbox or a one-way ticket to the spam folder. They make this critical decision based on a complex credit score for your email health: sender reputation.

To gain complete control over your email deliverability and safeguard your daily operations, it is crucial to pull back the curtain on how this hidden metric actually works.

✅ Understanding Sender Reputation

Marketers are increasingly discovering that their failing campaigns are caused not by bad email copy, but by broken technical infrastructure.

If a sending domain does not have perfectly configured SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, the major providers reject the email before it even reaches the recipient’s inbox. So what do all these acronyms mean?

Get the Table

Correctly configured technical records are the absolute foundation of your delivery infrastructure. Skipping these settings or looking for automated shortcuts with your domain reputation is a direct route to being blacklisted, instantly stalling your outreach momentum and cutting off core business revenue.

These technical records must be added to your DNS (Domain Name System) settings through your domain registrar or hosting provider, e.g., GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, or Google Domains

Because getting these foundational technical settings right requires manual configuration and patience, it can be tempting to look for quick fixes. This desire for immediate inbox placement drives many to seek out automated shortcuts to boost their new domain’s standing artificially. This trap often leads straight to the next major deliverability pitfall.

⚠️ The Danger of Warm-Up Services

When deciding to send to a new or dormant email list, many marketers use warm-up services to prepare their email addresses. However, you must proceed with caution because they may use automated bot accounts to fake real human conversations.

In theory, an email warm-up service is designed to trick mail networks into thinking a new or dormant domain belongs to a highly active, reputable sender. The service works by connecting your email account to a network of thousands of other simulated inboxes. These automated platforms then send messages back and forth between your account and their network, automatically opening the emails, pulling them out of spam folders, and generating artificial replies. The logic is that this fake interaction data will trick Google and Microsoft into granting your domain a high sender score, giving you a clear runway to launch mass outbound sales campaigns.

However, relying on these automated tricks is a gamble that rarely pays off in the long run. If you want to know where your domain actually stands without guessing, you need to audit your real-time reputation.

To check your sender score and track your deliverability health, you can use specialised tools like SenderScore.org, Google Postmaster Tools, MxToolBox, or Mail-Tester. There is an abundance of these monitoring platforms available online, and keeping a close eye on their metrics is the only reliable way to ensure your sales campaigns land in the inbox rather than the junk folder.

AI filters now easily detect this automated pattern and will suspend your entire domain. Microsoft and Google use AI to spot impossible human behaviour. They instantly flag accounts where opens and replies happen within seconds of delivery, or where a domain only interacts with a known cluster of other warm-up domains.

In February 2023, Google explicitly updated its Developer Policies to ban automated warm-up tools from using the Gmail API, cutting off these platforms from accessing Workspace infrastructure.

When the AI detects that an inbox is participating in a warm-up ring or triggering a high bounce rate from a dirty list, it issues a full tenant-level suspension. Microsoft and Google shut down the entire company’s Workspace or Microsoft 365 account, cutting off all corporate email and data.

📱 Social DMs are the New Inbox

Because traditional email infrastructure is blocking automated campaigns, some marketers are moving to direct messages to protect their delivery rates.

Over 62% of key B2B platform users are now younger decision-makers who naturally communicate and make purchasing decisions via rapid, conversational DMs instead of traditional email chains.

The B2B Strategy - Corporate Bookings

Instead of sending cold email sequences to office managers, B2B sales teams are moving to LinkedIn to run direct, real-time conversations based on active job changes and business signals. Traditional B2B cold email response rates have plummeted to averages between 1% and 5%. In contrast, LinkedIn direct outreach anchored to warm intent or context achieves a 10.3% average reply rate, effectively doubling the performance of cold email.

The B2C Strategy - Consumer Dining & Staycations

For everyday guests, hospitality brands are using automated Comment-to-DM funnels on Instagram and Facebook. Instead of telling a user to click a link, the post says: Comment the word ‘SUMMER’ below. An automated system immediately opens a DM with that user, providing menu packages and booking links instantly while their interest is highest.

40% of users now expect a business to respond to a query via social channels within a single hour, making slow email ticketing systems look obsolete by comparison.

Furthermore, research from McKinsey proves buyers place significantly higher trust in individual, peer-to-peer messaging than in mass company email broadcasts, making localised DMs a more effective sales and customer support tool.

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You now understand how modern AI filters read template text structures; Why keeping hard bounce rates under 1% protects your server reputation, and how automated warm-up rings risk full domain suspension.

On Thursday, the VIP briefing delivers the practical implementation steps. You will discover exactly how to format your outbound text to work with AI spam filters, alongside the modern engagement metrics that actually protect your domain. This strategic action plan gives you calm control over your communication infrastructure, allowing your sales team to safely protect hotel stays, private dining bookings, and food service contracts before your next campaign budget is committed.

That’s it for this edition. I hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter. I look forward to serving you again soon.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

Know someone trying to protect their outbound pipeline? Forward this to a fellow hotelier, restaurateur, or food service director who needs to audit their technical setup.

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📚 Sources & Resources

• Add custom spam filters to Gmail, Google Workspace Help (2026)

• Advanced Outlook.com security for Microsoft 365 subscribers, Microsoft Support (2026)

• Advanced phishing and malware protection | Gmail, Google Workspace Help (2026)

• Bursztein, E., Zhang, M., Vallis, O., Jia, X., & Kurakin, A., RETVec: Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer (arXiv:2302.09207), arXiv (2024)

• Change the level of protection in the Junk Email Filter in Outlook, Microsoft Support (2026)

• Cold Email Inbox Bounce Rate: Acceptable Thresholds and What to Do When Crossed, Litemail (2026)

• Deccio, C., Yadav, T., Bennett, N., Hilton, A., Howe, M., Norton, T., Rohde, J., Tan, E., & Taylor, B., Measuring email sender validation in the wild, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (2021)

• Effective end-to-end customer service with social media, McKinsey (2026)

• Effectiveness of B2B social media marketing: The effect of message source and message content on social media engagement, ResearchGate (2026)

• Email Marketing Benchmarks 2026: Open Rate, CTR & Bounce Rate, EmailAwesome (2026)

• Email sender guidelines, Gmail Help (2026)

• Email sender guidelines FAQ, Gmail Help (2026)

• Email Validation Tools & Email List Cleaning, ZeroBounce (2026)

• Ho, G., & Javed, M., Detecting Credential Spearphishing Attacks in Enterprise Settings (2026)

• How to Reduce Staff Turnover in Hospitality Industry, The Access Group (2026)

• Jiminez, A., Email Open Rates By Industry (& Other Top Email Benchmarks), HubSpot (2025)

• Petrov, S., 20 Statistics About Hotel General Managers + Demographics, OysterLink (2026)

• Protect Privacy Online with Google—Google Safety Centre, Safety Center (2026)

• Restaurant email marketing statistics: How emails drive reservations, loyalty, and revenue, Stripo.Email (2026)

• Set up DMARC | Security & data protection, Google Workspace Help (2026)

• Soldo, F., & Metwally, A., Traffic anomaly detection based on the IP size distribution, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM (2012)

• What are DMARC, DKIM, and SPF?, Cloudflare (2026)

Buy Me a Coffee ☕

Welcome to the August 2026 Hospitality Marketing Strategic Update. You are in the right place to get a handle on why search and social are changing and what you need to do to keep your venue front and centre.

Relying on outdated SEO or stagnant content is making many operators invisible in their local markets, while competitors are successfully using video to fill their covers.

By the end of this update, you will understand how to secure your position within AI-driven search results, adopt the video-first approach necessary for modern engagement, and tap into current food and beverage trends to protect your margins.

📄 On the Menu

• Platform Updates

• Emerging Trends

• Social Media Trends & Swipe File

• AI Prompt of the Month: Mood Marketing

• Strategic Recommendations

• 🧰 Download the Content Marketing Calendar for August 2026

Let’s Check In ☕

📢 Platform Updates

🔍 Google

Many people don’t realise how quickly the search environment is becoming a direct-booking and answer engine, which fundamentally changes how guests find your website.

• AI Performance Tracking: Google Search Console has launched Search Generative AI performance reports to help website owners track their visibility within AI Overviews and AI Mode.

• Publisher Profiles: Google Discover is rolling out Search profiles for U.S. publishers, creating a dedicated landing page to showcase their latest articles, social posts, and videos. Great for Thought Leadership.

• Unified AI Tools: A unified AI collaborator, Ask Advisor, has been introduced and spans Google Ads, Analytics, and Merchant Centre. It will answer questions about your performance.

• Next-Generation Ad Formats: New Gemini ad formats are launching in Search, including Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers, and expanded Direct Offers that allow for promotional bundling and native checkout.

• Legal Liability for AI Content: The Regional Court of Munich in Germany has ruled that Google can be directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews. The court found that AI summaries rewrite, combine, and evaluate information to present a complete answer rather than traditional search results, meaning Google is treated as the content creator.

🎬 YouTube

Video content is turning into a direct booking and dining pipeline where local creators hold the same influence as traditional media houses.

• The New Hollywood Push: At the 2026 Brandcast event, YouTube pitched its creators as mainstream entertainment networks, promoting exclusive creator shows for brand sponsorships. For hospitality brands, this means a sponsorship focus toward regional food and travel creators who command loyal, highly targeted audiences.

• AI Integration: The platform is integrating the Gemini Omni Flash model into YouTube Shorts Remix and the YouTube Create app to streamline video production. This allows hospitality marketing teams to quickly edit high-quality kitchen and venue footage directly from a mobile device.

• Prominent AI Labels: To maintain viewer trust, the disclosure label for photorealistic, altered, or synthetic content has been moved to a more prominent position directly below the video player. Authenticity remains critical for hospitality, where guests expect to see real, unaltered footage of your dishes and rooms.

• Smart TV Upgrades: For living room viewers, YouTube rolled out conversational search via the remote microphone, gaming title cards in descriptions, and a Who’s Watching screen integrated with Google Family Groups. This conversational search makes it much easier for families to discover local travel guides and restaurant features on the main home screen.

👥 Meta

The Reels Purchasing Engine: Short-form video drives an 81% stronger product discovery rate and holds a 47% influence over actual purchase decisions. If your team is still spending time editing static grid photos instead of filming raw 7-second clips of your best-selling dishes hitting a table, you are actively losing bookings to competitors who are using video to fill covers.

The Your Algorithm Threat: Instagram is letting users manually filter out topics they are tired of seeing. If your content is generic or relies on boring book now captions, users will simply untick hospitality and food from their preferences, and you will become completely invisible in your local market.

The Grid Control Hack: Instagram has finally introduced a Reorder your grid feature. This is an immediate fix for your first impressions. You no longer have to worry about a practical post—like a temporary holiday closure notice or a generic staffing ad—ruining your venue’s premium aesthetic. You can now manually drag your highest-margin dishes or your stunning terrace views back to the top three slots where incoming guests actually look.

Instagram Plus: The new paid tier introduces Story Spotlight to push stories to the front of a user’s feed, along with a 48-hour extended story window. For operators, this means the organic reach of your unpaid business stories is going to get squeezed even further. To combat this, save your critical promotions—like Sunday roast bookings or Christmas party packages—for high-impact windows rather than letting them get buried by paid user accounts.

🎵 TikTok

Customers are using TikTok as a visual search engine to validate your venue before booking, meaning your real reputation is now decided by community comments rather than your main feed.

• Universal Music Partnership Rebuilt: TikTok finalised a multi-year global licensing agreement with Universal Music Group (UMG). This restores their music discovery partnership, meaning venues can safely use trending commercial tracks on videos without facing audio muting or copyright strikes.

• Storytelling Training: The platform teamed up with the Sundance Institute to launch a micro-series storytelling program for creators. This highlights a broader consumer move away from overly polished promotional clips toward serialised, narrative-driven video content.

• European Commerce Expansion: Starting 15 June 2026, TikTok Shop will expand officially into Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland. For operators running retail or merchandise lines alongside food and beverage operations, this marks a significant growth in direct social commerce channels within Europe.

• The Comment is the Content: Brands are discovering that leaving highly contextual, sharp, or helpful comments on other viral posts frequently drives higher brand visibility and direct profile clicks than publishing original content alone.

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💼 LinkedIn

• The Premium Push for Credibility: According to LinkedIn data, 77% of B2B marketers state that buyers must know and trust a brand before engaging, while 82% agree that independent creators build vital credibility with decision-makers. To capture this, the platform has launched Creator Marketplace and BrandWorks to centralise creator discovery, campaign activations, and strategic support within Campaign Manager.

• Amplifying Trusted Voices: This ecosystem brings tools like BrandLink and Top Voices 360 into a unified space. For corporate catering, venue hire, and large-scale event spaces, operators can now locate vetted industry voices, access audience data, and directly amplify organic content or user recommendations using Thought Leader Ads.

• The Crackdown on AI Slop: LinkedIn officially announced it is actively suppressing low-effort, entirely AI-generated posts that lack unique perspectives. The system is penalising generic automation to ensure the feed prioritises authentic human voices, lived expertise, and professional authority.

• Programmatic CTV Expansion: For premium corporate targeting, LinkedIn expanded its programmatic connected TV (CTV) ad buying through the Amazon DSP. This allows corporate hospitality brands to use specific job titles and industry data to serve targeted streaming video adverts on smart TVs outside of the standard newsfeed workflow.

🥄 Emerging Trends

Here are the emerging trends to capitalise on before your competitors do

Read more

Welcome to your August 2026 strategic update. If you are a restaurant operator or hospitality business leader looking to grow your sales and protect your profits this summer, you are in the right place.

Today, we look at a major business problem: customer habits are changing much faster than standard marketing plans. Customers now trust small, local social media creators more than expensive advertisements. At the same time, younger guests use apps like TikTok instead of regular search engines to find places to eat. If your business keeps using old, rigid plans, you will lose customers to faster competitors before the summer ends.

By the end of this guide, you will know exactly what shifts are happening with short-form video apps, why these trends are driving table bookings, and the critical data behind recent artificial intelligence marketing mistakes.

📄 On the Menu

• Strategic Insights - Influencer Marketing

• Summer Restaurant Trends

• Inclusive Multi-Sensory Innovation

• Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Let’s Check In ☕

♞ Strategic Insights - Influencer Marketing

Did you know that 64% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand when it partners with a creator they follow? This data from Sprout Social demonstrates a direct link to booking intent. Guest behaviour is moving away from traditional channels. In fact, 36% of consumers now trust channels like Reddit, Threads, TikTok, and Instagram posts more than traditional search engines or AI chatbots. For Gen Z, that figure rises to 51%.

The market has moved away from high-cost, polished production. Guests trust budget-conscious, niche creators who share real experiences over corporate media. This behaviour directly impacts the P&L. Recent data shows that 83% of marketers agree that creator posts deliver more conversions than content posted from a venue’s own account. Furthermore, 49% of marketers say video is now the most important content type for driving guest engagement.

Successful European operators are changing how they allocate budget based on these changes. According to Kolsquare data, brands are multi-layering their strategy: 49% integrate creator marketing directly with PR and communications, while 45% also connect it to seasonal activities and venue launches. Because organic production costs with these creators are lower.

62% of marketing teams plan to redirect those savings into paid media amplification of creator content before the next trading quarter to protect margins.

The risk of inaction is significant. The move toward integration leaves only 26% of businesses still operating creator marketing in a silo. If your venue treats creator spend as an isolated task, your campaigns will fail to register. Standing still means your marketing budget will be wasted on disconnected activity.

🛍️ Summer Restaurant Trends

Your delivery app is now the front door to your dining room. Data shows that 74% of consumers say an in-venue visit led them to later order delivery from that same restaurant, while 62% say a delivery order prompted them to later dine in. For hospitality operators, these channels are no longer separate businesses; they form a continuous revenue loop dictated by the guest’s immediate routine.

While 86% of consumers demand the physical dining room for celebrations, weekday revenue relies on convenience. According to CGA’s consumer insights, 63% of consumers view dining out as a fundamental part of daily life. To capture this spend, Bidfood’s 2026 food and drink trends report shows that experience-led elements are required to boost summer footfall—leveraging their trending Whole Lotta Goodness profiles like gut-loving wholefoods alongside FastForward Flavours like sweet-heat hot honey.

Across London hubs like Soho and Shoreditch, businesses now actively design limited-time specials with TikTok in mind. Highly visual presentations, dramatic cheese pulls, colourful drinks, and oversized desserts are increasingly built into agile summer activations because they perform well on short-form video platforms. This captures the 66% of 18–34-year-olds who track viral trends, while 65% of these guests return when a venue tracks preferences for personalised follow-ups.

This social-driven dining culture directly overlaps with the broader experience economy, where consumers increasingly prioritise visually memorable experiences over traditional dining routines. Because TikTok compresses trend lifecycles from years into days, standard operational cycles are proving too slow to capture this demand. If your venue relies solely on rigid, static menu planning instead of flexible weekly features, you miss the window to align with these fast-moving consumer preferences.

🎨 Inclusive Multi-Sensory Innovation

Data from Mintel shows that 57% of adults agree that food and drink engaging multiple senses boosts mood more effectively than taste alone. During the summer trading window, multi-sensory innovation acts as a direct driver of spend-per-head. Furthermore, 30% of adults aged 18–44 state that social media directly influences the on-the-go snacks and light bites they select while moving through urban hubs during the warmer months.

Capturing this seasonal footfall requires active culinary innovation rather than standard menu updates. Summer hospitality relies on re-engineering dishes so guests slow down to evaluate the aroma, vibrant colours, and distinct textures of a presentation. This tactical use of contrasting ingredients allows venues to innovate naturally, using the plate to amplify the positive, sunny mindset that drives premium impulse spend.

This structural innovation is also a commercial necessity for inclusive hospitality, provided operators design for two distinct consumer needs. For GLP-1 medication users who experience suppressed appetites, intense multi-sensory elements are vital to make smaller, nutrient-dense portions highly satisfying. Conversely, accommodating neurodivergent guests requires clear menu mapping so they can choose between these high-sensory innovations and options that offer sensory predictability. Designing your summer menu to deliberately address both ends of this spectrum ensures your venue remains accessible to these affluent, health-conscious consumer groups.

Failing to adapt your portion structures and sensory profiles to these changing guest requirements means your summer rollout will alienate a highly loyal consumer base. If your seasonal planning remains rigid, this valuable on-the-go and inclusive cover spend will migrate to more empathetic competitors.

🚫 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

A blind reliance on generative AI recently triggered a massive commercial crisis for Starbucks Korea. Hours after debuting a summer promotion for its new Tank coffee tumbler line on 18 May, the brand sparked a national cultural backlash. The fallout was immediate: the parent company’s billionaire chairman issued a televised apology, the chief executive was dismissed, and the controversy reached the highest levels of the South Korean government.

While the Tank Series campaign was intended to highlight large-volume beverages, its timing and branding collided disastrously with national history.

The 18th of May marks the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju massacre, a sensitive historical tragedy where military forces violently suppressed pro-democracy protests. Naming a promotion Tank Day on this specific date reopened severe historical wounds.

The crisis was worsened by an AI-generated campaign slogan: “Thwack on the desk.” The marketing team had used an artificial intelligence tool to source concepts and copy suggestions. However, the software pulled a phrase that mirrored a notorious 1987 police cover-up, where authorities claimed a tortured student activist had died of shock after an officer simply hit a desk with a thwack.

Compounding this technical failure was a severe lack of human oversight. Internal managers approved the entire strategy without ever opening the email attachments containing the final creative assets.

Although Starbucks pulled the promotion within hours and immediately fired CEO Son Jeong-hyun, the reputational damage had already gone viral, with consumers filming themselves destroying Starbucks merchandise.

The financial impact hit the P&L instantly. Weekly card transactions at the stores plummeted by 26%, contributing to a 10% month-on-month revenue drop for May. Furthermore, furious consumers boycotted the brand by demanding refunds on an estimated 400 billion won (£230 million / $260 million) stored in Starbucks prepaid accounts.

Dropping This Thursday: The August VIP Strategic Toolkit

If you are tired of staring at a blank screen, wondering what to post, or worrying that your marketing is reactive rather than strategic, the VIP Lounge is designed to fix that.

Here is a breakdown of what VIP members are unlocking this month to stay ahead of the competition:

• The August VIP Content Planner & Downloadable Calendar: Every major hospitality event, date, and activation pre-mapped out for you. No last-minute scrambles.

• Cross-Platform Intelligence: Critical updates tracking what is changing right now across Google, YouTube, Meta, TikTok, and LinkedIn—so you know exactly where to focus your organic and paid attention.

• The August Social Swipe File: Immediate access to high-traction food and beverage trends, trending audio links, current colour palettes, and visual themes driving actual bookings across social.

• AI Persona Prompt of the Month: A plug-and-play prompt built to help you step inside your exact buyer personas’ heads, figure out what makes them hesitate, and build campaigns that convert.

• Quick Wins & Recommendations: Rapid-fire, high-impact tweaks you can apply to your messaging and campaigns this week.

Direct Expert Support: Unlimited access to the VIP Chat Lounge and direct private messaging with me to answer your specific marketing, campaign, or platform questions in real-time.

Whether you are reallocating your budget toward budget-conscious creators, transforming your menu presentation to capture visual social search habits, or insulating your booking pipelines against the zero-click realities of generative AI, the requirement remains the same—adapt your operations to match the immediate, daily routines of your consumer segments.

That’s it for this edition. I hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter. I look forward to serving you again soon.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

❓ Got a question about this issue?

📚 Sources

• Coley, B., AI Is Reshaping How Diners Discover Restaurants, DoorDash Study Finds, QSR Magazine (2026)

• Coley, B., The Marketing Playbook Fueling Dutch Bros’ National Expansion, QSR Magazine (2026)

• Collaborator, L. D. N., How TikTok is reshaping London food trends faster than ever, London Daily News (2026)

• Experience-led menus tipped to boost summer footfall, The Caterer (2026)

• Go beyond viral fads with multisensory innovations that are inclusive, Mintel (2026)

• How McDonald’s is serving up culture as part of its new strategic plan, Marketing Dive (2026)

• How spicy food drives customer loyalty at restaurants, Restaurant Business (2026)

• I Tried TikTok’s Viral Kool-Aid Pineapple—Here’s My Review, Parade (2026)

• Introducing Instagram Plus: More of What You Love, About Instagram (2026)

• Meta tests ‘Series’ for episodic Reels on Instagram and Facebook, TechCrunch (2026)

• Pinterest Summer 2026 Trend Report, Pinterest (2026)

• Pride Month 2026: Celebrating the LGBTQIA+ Community Through #PrideTikTok, Newsroom | TikTok (2026)

• Rashid, R., How a Starbucks marketing stunt spiralled into mass boycotts in South Korea, The Guardian (2026)

• Report: Affluent Travelers Favor Personalization and Experience Over Status, Hotel News Resource (2026)

• Restaurants turn to towers and sauce flights, Restaurant Business (2026)

• Schaefer, A., The economy is reshaping influencer storytelling, Sprout Social (2026)

• Travel Passions and Local Behaviors Are Reshaping Hotel Loyalty Across Asia Pacific Excluding China, Breaking Travel News (2026)

• Why marketers must rethink loyalty as AI reshapes consumer connections, Marketing Dive (2026)

Buy Me a Coffee ☕

AI has freed media buyers from routine reporting and budget management, with Meta’s Advantage+ and Google’s Performance Max outperforming humans in tactical execution. However, significant challenges remain, including creative pipeline management, tracking issues, and opaque algorithm behaviour.

In Understanding AI Ads: A Guide for Hospitality, we covered what the latest AI ad formats are, the benefits and the pitfalls to avoid. In this VIP edition, you’ll learn how to protect your budget, optimise your return on ad spend (ROAS) and create effective campaigns without wasting time and money with our six-step process.

📄 On the Menu

• Account Access & Protections

• Brand Templates & Copy Locking

• Targeting & KPIs

• Budgeting

• Generating Creatives

• Test & Optimise

• 🎁Downloadable Blueprints for Hotels, Restaurants and Foodservice

Let’s Check In ☕

🛡️ Account Access & Protections

• Set a hard account ceiling directly within your payment settings, as it is the single most effective shield against a runaway AI agent.

• Use an Account Spending Limit (ASL), which operates as a strict, cumulative lifetime cap across the entire ad account, independent of daily budgets.

• Apply a strict safety formula: Planned Monthly Budget + a 15–25% Buffer = Account Spending Limit.

• Allow for a buffer to accommodate legitimate performance spikes while preventing catastrophic API blowout.

• Never connect an autonomous AI tool or external script to an ad account using full Admin credentials.

🎨 Brand Templates & Copy Locking

• Upload your Brand Kit (logos, fonts, hex codes) before using Meta’s Generative AI Creative Tools to lock down brand consistency.

• Apply strict account-level brand controls to prevent AI agents from hallucinating or distorting ad components.

• Enforce structural limits to physically block tools like Google’s Asset Studio from altering core visual concepts.

• Set system-wide brand rules governing typography and logo placement to ensure all generated variations remain visually compliant.

• Maintain a centralised asset repository so that core asset updates (like a seasonal banner) automatically populate across live campaigns.

🎯 Targeting & KPIs

• Treat creative as the new targeting: Meta’s algorithm scans the visual elements, text overlays, and spoken words of an ad to determine which audience pocket to deliver it to.

• Build visual targeting mood boards for each customer segment: If you want to reach running enthusiasts, feature a trail runner in your ad instead of trying to find an affinity group.

• Capture unpredictable search intents: Use AI Max or Performance Max campaigns to match ads dynamically with long, highly conversational queries.

• Set Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) to optimise bids for generating maximum revenue based on your target percentage return.

• Request a Channel Performance Report regularly to spot wasted spend across networks like Display or YouTube and refine your asset quality accordingly.

⚖️ Budgeting

• Calculate daily budgets backwards: To find your true daily budget and prevent creeping overspend, divide your planned monthly target by 30.4 (the average number of days in a month).

• Anticipate daily platform overspend: Algorithms capitalise on high-intent days; Meta can legally spend up to 75% over your daily budget, and Google can spend up to 2x your daily budget in a single day.

• Control Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO): Set maximum spend limits on individual ad sets to prevent Meta’s CBO from starving your tests by funnelling 80–90% of the total budget into a single ad set.

Read more

You don’t invest in every new piece of kitchen equipment just because it’s trending; you only buy the tools that actually speed up service and protect your margins.

The same logic applies to navigating the digital landscape right now. With hundreds of AI updates dropping every day, it is incredibly easy to feel overwhelmed by the noise and wonder if your strategy is falling behind.

So, I’ve put together a practical guide to the latest AI ads and how to actually deploy them in your business.

📄 On the Menu

• What Are AI Ads?

• Benefits of AI Ads

• Critical Mistakes to Avoid

Let’s Check In ☕

Upgrade to VIP today to secure the definitive hospitality playbooks for
efficient, automated ad creation and spend

🌐 What Are AI Ads?

AI Ads are a new generation of digital advertising that uses artificial intelligence—such as Google’s Gemini, Meta AI or large language models like OpenAI to create dynamic, hyper-personalised, and multi-channel promotional experiences.

Powered by AI, these ads can dynamically generate content, offer tailored advice, and even chat with users directly within the search or browsing experience. Unlike regular ads, which require manual audience building, static copywriting, and constant creative tweaking, AI ads dynamically adjust in real time. This automation maintains your marketing campaigns without demanding manual hours during busy floor operations.

📋 Types of AI Advert

Get the Table

📈 Benefits of AI Ads

AI significantly lowers the steep costs associated with creative production. Instead of paying thousands of pounds for professional studio shoots or expensive content creators, operators can generate video and image assets for a fraction of the price.

The technology acts as a practical creative partner when used correctly. Tools like Google Asset Studio allow your team to quickly generate tailored headlines, descriptions, and video assets. This method reduces production delays and lowers creative costs for lean marketing teams.

Automated software removes repetitive administration from campaign management. New AI budgeting tools use demand-led pacing to automatically adjust your daily spending. The system increases spending to capture peak consumer interest. It reduces spending on slower trading days while staying strictly within your monthly limits. Operators using these automated budgets see a 66% average reduction in manual budget adjustments. Automating the production process speeds up multi-round revision cycles. This automation directly reduces burnout and friction across your team.

🔥 Maximum Performance & Efficiency

AI adverts drive significant revenue increases. Google AI Max campaigns drive up to an 80% sales increase for specific brands. The software matches your services to detailed search queries dynamically.

Search campaigns using Smart Bidding Exploration features secure an average of 27% more unique converting users. The technology reads the specific atmosphere of your venue or service. This mechanism delivers a 6% improvement in advert recall. It also provides an 8% improvement in advert quality.

For example, if you run a restaurant ad highlighting a stress-free family dinner, the AI understands the context and routes it to busy parents; if the ad features intricate chef’s plating, the AI delivers it directly to culinary enthusiasts. Delivers the exact right message to a guest based on their real-time intent.

⚠️ Critical Mistakes to Avoid

AI has clear advantages; however, automated platforms introduce specific pitfalls. You must monitor these challenges to protect your campaign performance.

⚙️ Auto-Enabled Settings

Right now, a lot of the industry discussions on forums like Reddit focus on forced enhancements in their Meta Ad Dashboard. This means elements inside your campaigns are ticked automatically without your input.

Meta auto-enables features like text variations, image expansion, and automatic music. Marketers report that these enhancements are often buggy and incoherent. In some cases, the system completely rewrites promotional copy.

For example, it changes a “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” offer into “Buy 1 Get 2 Free”. The algorithm can also replace your professional photography with irrelevant stock photos. It’s worth checking your back-end settings if you notice a drop in advertising performance.

🌀 The Delusion of Infinite Creative Volume

AI tools make it incredibly fast to write copy and generate images. Because of this speed, your team might pump out dozens of advert variations. However, creating fifty different adverts is often a massive waste of time.

It’s like your kitchen prepping fifty different specials for a single dinner service, but your front-of-house team only recommends the first dish that sells. The other forty-nine dishes sit on the pass. Your team wasted hours of prep time for zero return.

In this week’s VIP edition, we’ll show you exactly how to protect your venue against this and create Ads efficiently without your marketing dissolving into generic AI slop

Meta’s algorithm works exactly the same way. It picks a single winning advert almost immediately. The system funnels 90% to 99% of your daily budget into that single advert, completely starving your other creative variations of testing data.

This process can also make it harder for your venue to truly stand out. AI software builds creative assets by looking backwards to see what has historically worked for everyone else. While this approach gives you safe, standard optimisation, it can easily water down your unique brand identity. It tends to remix existing trends rather than capturing the distinct, human energy of your actual venue.

🤖 Autonomous Agentic Media Buying

The final issue on the list is autonomous agentic media buying.

Meta recently rolled out tools that allow AI assistants like Claude to connect directly to your ad accounts. It means AI agents can now autonomously create, launch, manage, and report on marketing campaigns without any human stepping into the dashboard.

While skipping the manual reporting routine sounds fantastic, the reality is making a lot of operators nervous. What happens if an AI agent hallucinates or makes a costly technical mistake that blows through an entire monthly budget in a single afternoon?

Right now, industry threads are treating the updates like a total minefield. The big questions being thrown around include:

• How do you actually manage risk in AI-powered ad automation?

• Are marketing teams genuinely ready for AI agents to touch live, high-stakes campaigns?

• Has anyone actually seen good results from Meta’s AI enhancements lately, or do we just need to know how to turn off site links and website highlights?

It leaves a lot of independent businesses wondering if AI is about to replace human media buyers entirely, or if it’s just creating a different kind of operational headache.

Your VIP Upgrade delivers immediate, practical value: step-by-step marketing blueprints tailored for hotels, restaurants, and foodservice, alongside clear budget baselines and direct answers to your AI advertising questions.

Subscribe now

You have more creative assets than ever before in your marketing arsenal. Controlling your automated ad variations ensures your campaigns attract highly qualified guests. Join me on Thursday for the VIP edition, where we will look at applications for Hotels, Restaurants and Foodservice.

That’s it for this edition. I hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter. I look forward to serving you again soon.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

📚 Sources & Resources

• 25+ AI Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2026, Adobe (2026)

• A new generation of ads for the AI era of Search, Google (2026)

• Fuel your next wave of growth on YouTube with Demand Gen, Google (2026)

• Introducing Meta Ads AI Connectors: Manage Your Meta Ads From the AI Tools You Already Use, Meta for Business (2026)

• Kaancata, Meta just released Ads MCP. This is where Facebook Ads ops is going imo [Reddit Post], R/FacebookAds (2026)

• Meet Ask Advisor, your new AI-powered collaborator, Google (2026)

• Meta AI business assistant, Meta for Business (2026)

• Prinnykin, Meta keeps re-applying AI image adjustments to my ads even after I turn them off. Is this happening to anyone else? [Reddit Post], R/FacebookAds (2026)

• Unlock next-level performance with AI Max for Search campaigns, Google (2025)

If you’ve enjoyed my work, you can Buy Me a Coffee ☕. Your support helps me bring new insights to the hospitality industry.

In The Science of Profitable Menu Engineering, we covered Price Anchoring, Decoy Pricing, and Primacy and Recency Effects. In this VIP edition, you will learn how to identify high-margin dishes, optimise your physical layout, and implement precise pricing mechanics without increasing ingredient costs, adding operational complexity, or spending days analysing spreadsheets.

📄 On the Menu

• Identifying High Margin Performers

• Grouping & Layout Dynamics

• Pricing Mechanics, Anchoring & Strategy

• Digital & Phygital Checklist

• Approvals Checklist

Let’s Check In ☕

🧮 Identifying High Margin Performers

Commercial reality dictates that raw volume does not guarantee profitability. To accurately categorise your menu performance, you must first establish your precise baseline costs.

Here’s what needs to be included in the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) calculation for each dish:

• Raw Ingredients & Proteins: The precise cost of the main component, e.g. the exact weight of the steak, fish, or vegetable

• Sub-Recipes & Prep Components: The cost of sauces, marinades, dressings, or purees made in-house that go onto the plate.

• Garnishes & Seasonings: Herbs, micro-greens, cooking oils, butter, salt, and spices used during cooking or plating.

• Item-Specific Packaging: Any disposable or branded items that must leave the kitchen with that specific dish, e.g. takeaway boxes, burger wraps, branded greaseproof paper, or skewers

Everything else, including kitchen labour, gas, electricity, rent, or general wastage margins, must be excluded. This keeps the calculation strictly limited to the direct cost of producing that single plate.

• [ ] Pull Your Sales Data: Export a 90-day product mix report from your EPOS system and segment it by category.

• [ ] Audit Your COGS: Input direct costs into the spreadsheet tool (Include ingredients/packaging; exclude labour/utilities).

• [ ] Run the Spreadsheet Matrix: Identify where each dish lands based on the automated popularity and profitability dropdowns.

⚠️ A word of warning

The classic Boston Consulting Group matrix taught every marketing consultant in the world to find the “Dogs“ (low popularity, low profitability) and delete them from the menu to reduce bloat. However, this could be a costly mistake. If you delete an unpopular, low-margin dish without realising it was serving as the psychological contrast anchor for your top seller, the sales of your highest-margin Stars items will instantly plummet.

Use this Spreadsheet to categorise your dishes

Read more

A chef doesn’t perfect a signature dish in one night. They refine it recipe by recipe, service by service, improving 1% every single day.

That is my philosophy for marketing, and it is exactly why we are breaking down menu engineering in this edition. You don’t need to reinvent your entire business tomorrow; you just need to sharpen the small, high-impact techniques hiding in plain sight.

When done correctly, effective menu layout goes beyond aesthetics to boost sales, speed up decision-making, and maximise your profitability.

📄 On the Menu this week

• Price Anchoring

• Decoy Pricing

• Primacy & Recency

Let’s Check In ☕

Stefano had spent weeks crafting a beautiful new menu for his brasserie. He took equal care in formatting the PDF version for his website and socials, too. He felt proud of the final design.

But over time, he realised that he was frequently selling the lower-margin dishes rather than the high-margin ones; it was the same story with delivery orders.

Stefano felt stuck. His kitchen team was working incredibly hard under tight constraints. Taxes and bills were up, and customers were struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.

He knew he couldn’t increase his prices without losing guests. And he cannot absorb higher food costs either. So what can he do? How can he increase sales for higher-margin orders when the pricing is locked?

The answer lies in menu engineering and layout.

⚓ Price Anchoring

While many operators treat menu design as an aesthetic project, the reality is that strategic layout dictates financial success. To maximise your returns, you must understand how the human brain evaluates price and value.

Price anchoring uses human psychology to protect your gross profit. The human brain relies heavily on the first piece of cost information it sees. When a guest views a menu, the highest price creates a mental reference point. Every other choice is measured against this initial figure. This process guides diners naturally toward your preferred options.

💸 The 27% Revenue Lift

Research from Cornell University School of Hotel Administration found that strategic menu styling and layout choices can boost a restaurant’s overall sales by up to 27% without changing any ingredients or base prices.

• This approach offers clear operational advantages.

• It increases the sales volume of high-margin items.

• You do not need to offer discounts.

• It supports your kitchen team by directing demand toward consistent dishes.

• Your average spend per head increases.

• Guest satisfaction remains high because diners recognise the value.

For instance, placing a high-margin £18 Truffle Mushroom Pasta next to a £24 Wild Sea Bass Special makes the pasta appear more affordable.

The anchor item does not even need to sell well. Its entire job is to change the baseline perception of value for the dishes below it. You are not trying to clear inventory on that expensive dish. You use it to frame the cost of your other menu items.

📡 Emerging Trends

Global dining behaviour trends indicate that the anchor of the first category ordered dictates the price tolerance for the rest of the dining experience.

If a table is successfully nudged into buying a premium, well-anchored starter, their subconscious valuation of the main course instantly rises. Main course sales for mid-to-high tier items can jump by over 20% for the rest of the meal. This outcome occurs even if those main courses have no anchor in their own section. And there’s more.

The anchor changes the guest’s entire spending mindset for the night.

🚨 The Rejection Threshold

But if the anchor is too extreme, the brain flags it as a gimmick. For example, placing a £150 Caviar Platter next to a £14 Wagyu Beef Burger triggers a rejection bias that breaks customer trust. The anchor must be premium. It must remain completely authentic to the brand concept.

Coming Up this Week
Menu Engineering Optimisation Checklist

VIP is for readers who want to reduce avoidable
revenue risk in hospitality marketing.

Subscribe now

🎭 Decoy Pricing

You encounter decoy pricing every day without realising. This commonplace marketing tactic works completely undetected because it plays directly on a hardwired mental habit. The human brain hates being inefficient, so consumers always look for maximum value when ordering.

Decoy prices shape the buyer’s perception, nudging them towards higher-margin options without direct price hikes. For the customer, choosing the higher-priced option feels like an intellectual win, rather than an upsell.

You’ll see this used in most coffee shops and wine bars.

While the Small Coffee is £3.50, the Medium Coffee at £6.00 feels overpriced in comparison.

By placing the Large Coffee at £6.50, the price difference between the Medium and Large makes the Large Coffee look like the better value.

Now, the Medium coffee appears to be an unattractive option, and customers are more likely to opt for the Large, which brings in a higher margin for the business.

A study published in the International Hospitality Review looked at restaurant menu bundling. Without a decoy, only 45% of diners chose a higher-priced combo bundle, for example, burger + soda + fries, over a standalone lower-priced burger. By introducing a decoy pricing structure, the proportion of diners selecting the highest-priced combo option surged to 71%.

The same study tracked how this consumer behaviour scales across wider hospitality sectors, evaluating hotel booking habits. Without a decoy, 35% of guests selected a higher-priced room tier with an open cancellation policy. Introducing an intentionally unappealing intermediary option drove 65% of consumers to select the highest-priced room option.

⚠️ A Word of Caution

Deploy this tactic with respect to your customers. This is about guiding choice, not setting a trap. Modern diners are incredibly sharp; if a decoy feels like a synthetic trick rather than a genuine layout of value, you instantly erode the hospitality trust that brings them back through your doors.

You must watch out for decoy fatigue. Do not apply this tactic to every section of your menu. Too many decoys create visual confusion. Guests become overwhelmed by constant value calculations, which means they default to the lowest-priced option to save time.

Consumers are also highly sensitive to perceived price gouging. The decoy option must offer real, physical substance. An artificial middle option destroys guest trust instantly.

The decoy must be completely inferior to the target option in terms of value, but closely aligned in attributes. If the decoy offers a separate, distinct benefit like a completely different flavour profile or unique ingredient, the customer treats it as a brand-new choice, which causes analysis paralysis and lowers overall spend.

Marketing effort means nothing if your booking journey leaks revenue. The Hospitality Marketing Hub provides the exact operational tools to fix those leaks today. These frameworks are tested inside active hospitality venues to ensure they protect your margins.

These tools deliver immediate commercial outcomes:

• Standardise guest recovery to turn complaints into repeat visits.

• Evaluate your digital visibility to capture more direct bookings.

• Manage your review responses to protect brand trust and conversion rates.

• Measure campaign performance to stop wasting your marketing budget.

Deploy these frameworks before your next seasonal campaign goes live.

Shop Hospitality Marketing Hub

🧠 Primacy & Recency Effects

Did you know that the sequence of your menu text dictates guest choices before they even read a description?

Most operators assume guests read a category list evenly. In reality, human attention hits specific hot spots. Diners focus naturally on the first and last items in any menu section. This consumer behaviour relies on a bias known as the primacy and recency effects.

Apply this high-level placement to protect your profit margins.

• Open each category with a reliable performer. This can be a dish with broad appeal, high profitability, or strong brand association. This top position uses the primacy effect to capture immediate interest.

• Place your second high-margin target dish at the very end of the list. This bottom position uses the recency effect to capture the final choice before the guest decides.

• Hide your low-margin utility items in the middle section. They remain accessible without stealing focus from your profitable options.

“Just because consumers know a product exists, does not mean they will be more likely to buy it.” Dr Sybil S. Yang

🧩 The Chunking Reset

Long lists kill guest attention completely. If a category features more than six items, it must be visually broken into distinct sub-sections. Use subtle dividers or short category headers to group your dishes. This structural change manually resets the brain of the customer. It generates two sets of primacy and recency hotspots instead of one, giving you more opportunities to feature top dishes

📱 Physical Layouts Versus Digital Screens

You must evaluate digital menus differently from physical paper pages. Traditional behavioural experts still rely on eye-tracking studies from print media. Mobile ordering follows entirely different rules.

AI models analyse millions of smartphone viewport metrics. The data reveals that the classic F-shape reading pattern is completely dead on digital or mobile menus. On a screen, users do not scan horizontally. They swipe vertically. Primacy becomes a constantly moving target. It is whatever occupies the top 30% of the phone screen at any given millisecond.

AI has detected a severe pattern called the scroll void. When users swipe down a menu, their scrolling speed accelerates by up to 300% in the exact centre of a long category. Diners do not deliberately ignore the middle items. Their thumbs physically push past the text too fast for the human eye to register the words.

The middle of a mobile menu is a completely invisible void. You must use a structural break, a distinct icon, or a micro-animation to halt the kinetic velocity of the thumb.

Review your mobile screen layouts and apply these positions before your next planning window closes.

A beautiful menu means nothing if your item sequence hides your most profitable dishes. True menu engineering commands guest attention to make your high-margin choices completely unavoidable.

That’s it for this edition. I look forward to serving you again soon.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

📚 Sources & Resources

• Almoradie, C., [WATCH] Optimizing your Menu – Mission Possible by Professor Sherri Kimes, HSMAI Academy (2025)

• Anchoring decisions: The role of decoy pricing in consumer choices, ResearchGate (2026)

• Berkman, S. H., Eric., Designing Mobile Interfaces, O’Reilly Media (2026)

• Gribble, D., The Menu Mistakes Draining Your Margins, Hospitality Marketing Insight (2025)

• Huber, J., Payne, J. W., & Puto, C., Adding Asymmetrically Dominated Alternatives: Violations of Regularity and the Similarity Hypothesis, Journal of Consumer Research (1982)

• Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Science (2026)

• Menu Psychology: How Customers Make Ordering Decisions | 2026 Guide, NeatMenu (2026)

• Noone, B. M., & Cachia, G., Menu engineering re-engineered: Accounting for menu item substitutes in pricing and menu placement decisions, International Journal of Hospitality Management (2020)

• Roediger, H. L., & Yamashiro, J. K., Memory, The Cambridge Handbook of the Intellectual History of Psychology (2019)

• The Decision Lab—Behavioral Science, Applied, The Decision Lab (2026)

• Whitfield, J., No, You Shouldn’t Use the F Pattern in UX Design, Medium (2023)

• Yang, S. S., Eye movements on restaurant menus: A revisitation on gaze motion and consumer scanpaths, International Journal of Hospitality Management (2012)

• Yoo, M., Bahg, G., Turner, B., & Krajbich, I., People display consistent recency and primacy effects in behavior and neural activity across perceptual and value-based judgments, Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience (2025)

Enjoyed my work? Buy Me a Coffee ☕

In What’s Actually Working in Restaurant Marketing Right Now (And What’s Not), we covered the latest digital channel performance, creative-driven Meta Ads, and how to respond to the Instagram Aggregator collapse. In this VIP edition, you’ll learn how to plan marketing campaigns by daypart—without the headache, match your creative assets to the shifting moods of real-world consumers, and command Meta’s next-gen algorithmic ad targeting without burning out your team or wasting your mental energy.

📄 On the Menu

• Targeting without the Cognitive Headache

• 30-Day Daypart Marketing Planner

• AI Prompt: Daypart Marketing

Let’s Check In ☕

🧠 Targeting without the Cognitive Headache

Traditional marketers can spend weeks or even months defining distinct audience personas—such as post-school-run mums or Gen Z weekend groups. These insights were then used in Ad campaigns to narrow the audience by interest targeting.

Here’s a simple example of this

• The Busy Parent 24-39: Looks for quick, child-friendly food. They want promotions during the week and fast takeaway or delivery options.
  Interests: Parenting, Family & relationships, Early childhood education, Toys.

• The Office Worker 30-60: Wants fast service, reliable quality, and clear receipts. They look for easy lunch options for themselves or their work teams
  Interests: Business, Corporate culture, Professional networking, Finance.

• The Weekend Diner 40-70: Looks for a good atmosphere and special menus for weekends or dates. They usually book tables in advance and read online reviews.
  Interests: Dining out, Fine dining, Gastronomy, Wine, Craft beer.

🛎️ How Ads Were Traditionally Served

The traditional digital Ad process was straightforward. You uploaded your creatives (Ads) to whichever advertising platform you were using, and then manually selected targeting options to decide who to reach. You used locations, general age ranges, and interest categories to find your audience.

Historically, this hyper-specific targeting allowed venues to be incredibly precise. However, that level of tracking led to widespread global complaints regarding consumer privacy. As a result, platforms like Meta removed a significant portion of interest-based targeting options from their systems entirely. With the old manual targeting data gone, advertising networks had to build a completely new way to match ads to users. This tracking gap is exactly why platforms built next-generation AI retrieval engines.

As ads have evolved, we have moved from One-to-All broadcasting and One-to-Many interest segments and now into One-to-One advertising. Instead of your ad being delivered to a broad list of people who happen to match an interest category, you are now creating ads that speak to individuals personally.

💎 The Reality of Modern Buyers

Traditional ad targeting treated a customer like a static persona. If they are a parent, the system always treats them as a parent. But an individual does not have just one persona. They switch between different personas depending on the time of day, the weather, and their stress levels, for example

• 08:00 The Rushed Commuter: It is a rainy Monday morning. They are stressed, running late, and looking for a fast caffeine fix. They want speed, short queue times, and easy mobile ordering.

• 13:00 The Office Worker: It is lunchtime. They need a break from their desk and want a reliable, quick meal with colleagues. With set lunch menus, healthy options, and fast service.

• 17:00 The Parent: They have finished work and just picked up their child from school. They are tired and do not want to cook dinner. They want value bundles, kid-friendly food, and easy parking or collection.

• 20:00 The Socialiser: It is Friday evening. The sun is out, the work week is over, and they are meeting friends for drinks and food; and a desire for unique atmosphere, premium menu options, and a good drinks list.

This fluid movement between identities means a single consumer requires entirely different creative hooks depending on the hour they see them. And it is exactly these real-time behavioural changes that Meta’s AI tracks to determine who sees your content.

🛵 How Meta AI Delivers Ads

When you launch an ad on Instagram, Facebook, Threads or WhatsApp, Meta’s AI system immediately analyses your creative content. It looks at three main signals to decide who will see your ad:

• Visual & Audio Data: The AI reads the images, video frames, text, and voice to understand exactly what your product or brand is about.

• Content Similarity: It compares your ad to millions of other successful ads. It looks for similar patterns in colours, lighting, and pacing.

• Early Engagement: The AI measures how quickly the very first viewers react to your ad (likes, comments, or watch time) to decide how fast to show it to a wider audience.

What this means is that the algorithm no longer relies on who you tell it to target; instead, the system uses these immediate engagement and visual signals to find your audience for you. Because the machine now handles the distribution based entirely on the creative asset itself, your tactical approach to campaign setup must adapt.

📣 How to Reach Customers Using AI-Powered Ads

To reach new audiences now, brands cannot rely on manual targeting. Instead, you must change the style of your ad content. This means creating ads with structurally diverse concepts. For example, you should:

• Change the emotional trigger: Switch between ads focused on humour, urgency, or relaxation.

• Target a different persona through the creative: Change the core message of your video or image to naturally attract a completely different customer group.

• Deploy a variety of creative styles before going live: Test diverse formats such as direct-to-camera pieces, casual user-generated content, highly polished imagery, and raw imagery while varying your messaging angles. Allow a set testing period for the platform to gather initial data, enabling you to scale up the performing ads while pausing assets that fail to deliver.

By focusing your efforts on producing varied creative assets rather than building complex audience lists, you give the platform the exact material it needs to find your guests. Aligning these diverse assets with the natural rhythm of your customer’s day is exactly why I built the Dynamic Daypart Content Planner.

⏰ The Dynamic Daypart Content Planner

I have put together this Dynamic Daypart Content Planner to show you exactly how personas behave differently across different days and times. You can download this spreadsheet and use it as a practical template to map out your own customers’ week.

Every restaurant has a different audience. For example, if your venue is in a financial district, you might sell much more to city workers than to busy parents. If that is the case, you can simply adjust the grid and remove the parent persona completely.

There is plenty of room on the worksheet for you to edit, change, and adapt the labels based on your own unique venue, location, and busiest hours.

Read more

Navigating restaurant marketing has fundamentally changed. With 74% of diners using social media as their primary discovery engine and Google AI Overviews altering search behaviour, traditional strategies no longer cut it.

From the collapse of Instagram aggregator accounts to the rise of creative-driven Meta ads, restaurant operators must adapt.

📄 On the Menu

• 2026 Social Media Performance

• Creative-Driven Meta Ads

• The Instagram Aggregator Collapse

Let’s Check In ☕

📊 2026 Channel Performance

Social media has been the primary discovery engine for diners for a while now, effectively acting as a restaurant’s new front door. Currently, 74% of consumers use social platforms to choose a dining venue.

TikTok content directly influences dining choices for 61% of consumers. This platform is the key driver of venue choice for 50% of users. It now outperforms Instagram, Facebook, and Yelp for initial guest acquisition. Younger generations depend on visual apps to validate your menu profile.

Restaurants with clear social media strategies report an average 9.9% increase in direct business-to-consumer revenue. Brands with a social-first focus achieve an even higher average revenue increase of 14.1%.

Instagram drives significant volumes of direct bookings. Venues with direct reservation links in Instagram Stories see a 41% lift in confirmed bookings. Performance varies by format on the app. Instagram Reels average a 2.7% engagement rate for hospitality brands. This metric tracks at nearly double the 1.4% engagement rate of static image carousels.

Search patterns are changing alongside social media. Google AI Overviews now appear for 48% of general search queries. AI assistants pull 76% of their restaurant citations from external reviews and social accounts. They rarely use your actual website for these summaries. Therefore, your off-site digital footprint dictates your discovery rate.

Local map discovery captures 93% of guests right before choosing a venue. Finally, email marketing remains your most stable revenue anchor. Direct messages to an owned database protect your profit margins from changing algorithms. Email marketing in the restaurant industry boasts an incredible return on investment (ROI) of approximately $42 for every dollar spent.

Restaurant Marketing Cheat Sheet

🎨 Creative-Driven Meta Ads

Spending in social media advertising worldwide is projected to reach US$338.75bn in 2026 with an annual growth rate of 11.86%, leading to a projected market volume of US$530.34bn by 2030. It’s anticipated that 82.9% of total ad spending will be generated through mobile by 2030.

As global social ad spend climbs to historic highs, independent operators can no longer afford to waste a single pound of budget on automated delivery systems that punish lazy creative formats.

🎯 Creative is the New Targeting

Over the past few years, detailed interest targeting has been removed due to privacy changes. Meta countered this by adapting their algorithm to interpret signals within the creative to decide who should see it.

For example, if a restaurant runs an ad highlighting a quick, stress-free family dinner, the AI will analyse that context and deliver it to busy parents. If the same restaurant runs an ad focused on a chef’s intricate plating techniques, the AI will automatically route it to culinary enthusiasts.

Because the AI reads the intent and context of the ad, simple cosmetic changes do not influence the algorithm into reaching new audiences.

Meta uses advanced neural networks on the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip to track data interactions. In simple terms, this hardware allows the algorithm to process data much like a human brain. It reads the exact vibe of your dining room or the style of your food instantly. The machine matches your content to a consumer’s mood in real-time. This deployment across Instagram and Facebook applications has achieved +6% recall improvement to the retrieval system, delivering +8% ads quality improvement on selected segments.

To reach new dining audiences, you must provide the AI with structural diversity. You must alter what the ad fundamentally communicates to suit different customer dayparts. Five structurally distinct ads will heavily outperform thirty slightly tweaked versions of the same idea. The algorithm handles the heavy lifting. It matches each distinct concept to the correct local diner automatically.

🛑 What Not To Do - Instagram Aggregator Accounts Collapse

One of the biggest shake-ups this year is the throttling of aggregator accounts, commonly referred to as a theme page. An aggregator is a profile that primarily curates, downloads, and reposts content created by other people, rather than producing its own original material. Examples include city-specific food accounts with large follower bases. Marketers paid these curators for sponsored posts. They provided free meals to secure features on the page feed.

Historically, for many restaurants, getting featured on one of these large aggregator networks meant they could tap into a wide audience and siphon traffic without having to invest the time and money required to shoot their own original video content.

However, within the digital creator community, aggregator networks are highly controversial and are frequently criticised for stealing content, traffic, and views from the original creators who put the actual work into producing the media, and Meta agrees.

Instagram recently rolled out a massive set of updates expanding its anti-aggregator protections. While the platform previously only punished unoriginal Reels, this penalty has officially been extended to include photos and carousels.

If the platform’s AI detects that an account is primarily reposting unoriginal content, that account is completely stripped from the Explore page and suggested feeds. What’s more, users often recognise recycled content and scroll past it; these posts tend to suffer from a high Skip Rate, which signals the algorithm to instantly throttle the account’s reach.

Currently, 49% of all Instagram views come from non-followers who are served content via algorithmic recommendations. Being blocked from the Explore and suggested feeds effectively makes these curator accounts invisible to new audiences.

Protect Your Team From Creative Burnout

Your front-of-house and kitchen teams are meant to create culinary magic, not suffer under the exhausting, non-stop pressure of a content production studio. Our VIP Daypart Planner treats your customers’ changing roles—from the School Run Survivalist to the Sunday Dread Fighter—as the true heroes of your narrative week. We have pre-mapped these psychological triggers from Breakfast through to Late Night, allowing your team to connect empathetically with local diners
without the operational burnout.

Get the 30-Day Daypart Planner

That’s it for this edition. I look forward to serving you all again soon. Got any questions? Drop them in the comments and I’ll get back to you.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

📚 Sources & Resources

• ascendviral., Instagram just killed aggregator accounts, R/SocialMediaMarketing (2026)

• fe3lix., I ran 1,378 winning Meta ads through a model I spent too long building. The formula they share is uglier than the industry wants to admit, R/FacebookAds (2026)

• Meta Andromeda: Supercharging Advantage+ automation with the next-gen personalized ads retrieval engine, Engineering at Meta (2024)

• Restaurant delivery preferences in the U.S. by generation 2025, Statista (2026)

• Restaurant email marketing statistics: How emails drive reservations, loyalty, and revenue, Stripo.Email (2026)

• Rewarding original creators on Instagram, Instagram for Creators (2026)

• Social Media Advertising—Worldwide | Market Forecast, Statista (2026)

• Social Media Benchmarks For 2026, Socialinsider (2026)

• Social media impact on food choices on holiday UK 2025, Statista (2026)

• Social Media Statistics for Restaurants & Hospitality Brands (2026), Joli (2026)

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This month’s update covers the critical shift toward a human premium in hospitality marketing. As Google integrates Gemini AI into Maps, the way guests discover your venue has changed from simple keyword searches to complex, natural language queries. We also look at the Meta ad performance collapse seen in April 2026 and why Uber’s move into hotel bookings creates a new, high-stakes distribution challenge for your margins.

To cut through the noise of AI slop and banner blindness, we break down why lo-fi, episodic content, and radical transparency are now your most effective conversion tools. From the nostalgic pull of Picniccore to the revenue potential of 14-day micro-seasons, this issue provides the strategic roadmap to maintaining trust and authority in an increasingly sceptical market.

📄 On the Menu

• Platform Updates

• Emerging Trends

• Food & Beverage Trends

• Mood Board - Picniccore

• Marketing Mistakes to Avoid - AI Slop

• Social Media Trends

• AI Prompt of the Month

• What To Do & What Not To Do

• July Content Calendar

Let’s Check In ☕

📢 Platform Updates

🗺️ Google Maps Upgrade

Google has deployed its most significant overhaul of Maps in a decade. For hospitality operators, these changes move beyond simple navigation. They fundamentally change how your venue is discovered and judged by the machines that sit between you and your guests.

Google has integrated its Gemini AI directly into Maps through a feature called Ask Maps. Guests no longer need to search for a specific category, like restaurant. They can now ask complex questions in natural language. They are asking highly specific things, such as where can I charge my phone without a long wait for coffee, or is there a quiet spot for a midway meeting with vegan options?

The AI uses the guest’s past behaviour, like previous searches for vegan food, to prioritise recommendations without the guest having to ask. It analyses information from over 300 million places and 500 million contributors to find the answer. If your Google Business Profile lacks structured, detailed information about your amenities, like plug sockets or specific dietary options, you will not appear in these results.

Google is also increasing the authority of its community through a major redesign of its Local Guides program.

Top-tier reviewers now have gold indicators that make them stand out in feeds.

Google is using Gemini to suggest AI caption drafts for photos uploaded by guests. This makes it faster for guests to post detailed reviews with a single tap. To maintain trust, new AI systems will now pause reviews during suspected spam spikes or block suspicious edits to your profile.

The influence of high-level Local Guides has increased. A single review from a gold contributor carries more weight in the AI recommendation logic than dozens of standard reviews.

Google has also expanded its AI Max advertising product specifically for travel brands. This system moves away from traditional keyword bidding. It uses AI to match your ads to conversational intent. Your hotel ads and booking links are now eligible to appear directly inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, where Google answers travel queries on the results page. You are losing keyword control. To win bookings, your ad creative and website content must focus on the problems you solve for guests.

Audit your Google Business Profile attributes immediately. Ensure every factual detail, from EV charging to Wi-Fi speed, is selected in your profile. The AI cannot guess these facts. Identify reviews from top-tier Local Guides and respond to them professionally. These are your most powerful trust signals in 2026.

Ensure your venue is photo-ready at all times. With Google suggesting camera roll uploads to guests, fresh and high-quality guest photos are now a primary ranking factor.

🏨 Uber’s Expansion into Hotel Bookings

Uber has evolved from a simple transport provider into a comprehensive travel booking platform. The company recently introduced a Hotel Tab inside its main application. This new capability is powered by strategic partnerships with Expedia for the booking infrastructure and Accor for branded hotel inventory. This turns a service that guests already use heavily for local transport into a direct point of sale for accommodation. To drive adoption, Uber One members are being offered 10% back in credits on hotel stays and a minimum 20% discounts at specific properties worldwide.

This development introduces a highly visible new distribution channel for the hospitality sector.

However, it also brings significant risks to your margin. While these technology partnerships provide access to additional demand, they heavily complicate your channel management. You now have to defend your pricing consistency and manage varying commission structures across an even wider landscape.

Review your distribution agreements before the next trading month begins. You must verify exactly how your inventory is syndicated through major partners like Expedia. Ensure your rooms are not appearing on the Uber application at a price that undercuts your own direct rates. You need to protect your rate parity to maintain control of your customer acquisition costs.

🛑 Meta Paid Ads Problems

If you rely heavily on Facebook and Instagram ads for direct bookings, you should audit your spend immediately. Marketers report a complete breakdown in Meta ad performance throughout April 2026. Accounts are experiencing massive spikes in cost per thousand impressions. Budgets are either spending too slowly or burning through daily limits in minutes. Many operators are seeing sudden account restrictions without cause. This platform volatility is a direct threat to your paid acquisition pipeline.

We are seeing a severe pattern that media buyers call the three-day death cycle. Campaigns yield a profitable return for the first 72 hours. Then they completely stop converting. You might see high add-to-cart metrics for your room bookings. But these are increasingly fake signals. Advertisers report massive spikes in bot traffic. This junk traffic is concentrated in the over-65 age demographic. You are paying for clicks with zero purchasing intent.

This chaos stems from recent algorithm updates like Andromeda. Meta is rolling out automated AI settings onto ad accounts. Features like Advantage Plus Audience and Auto Image Stretch are turned on by default. These forced updates often interfere with carefully planned targeting strategies. Tracking glitches are also causing severe discrepancies between Meta reports and your actual backend sales.

You must change your creative approach to survive this market. High production value is dead. Guests have developed ad blindness to highly stylised food and resort photography. Data shows that raw and unpolished native creatives outperform polished commercial assets by a factor of two. We call this the ugly ad paradigm. A simple video shot on a phone results in more reservations than a studio-quality shoot.

Consider moving your production budget away from expensive video shoots and invest in local nano-influencers. These smaller creators provide a much better customer acquisition cost. If your campaigns remain unstable, pause your high-spend Meta ads. Diversify your budget to platforms like TikTok or Google Ads until stability returns.

📈 Emerging Trends

Read more

While you have been busy perfecting the guest experience on the floor, the digital gatekeepers have fundamentally changed how your business is found. According to recent data, AI brand sentiment is now a primary factor in whether an AI agent will even suggest your property to a high-value traveller. If an AI agent flags even a single recurring service theme, such as slow service, your venue could be filtered out of recommendations entirely, regardless of your five-star rating.

In this July 2026 Strategic Update, we are lifting the lid on why your business profile might be failing the AI Filter and how standard social proof could actually be leaking revenue. We also explore the surprising truth about guest psychology: why travellers now trust algorithms more than your team for logic and facts, but still crave the human touch for taste and emotion.

📄 On the Menu

• Why Your Business Profile is Failing the AI Filter

• Why Guests Trust Your Data More Than Your Team

• When Social Proof Hits a Revenue Ceiling

• The Specific Service Failures Killing Your Retention

Let’s Check In ☕

🗺️ Why Your Business Profile is Failing the AI Filter

According to Deloitte’s 2026 Travel Outlook, AI Brand Sentiment is now a primary factor in whether an AI agent will even suggest your property to a high-value traveller.

Let’s say a guest asks their AI assistant to book a premium dinner for four with efficient service. Even if you have a five-star rating, if the AI’s sentiment analysis has flagged slow service as a recurring theme, you will be filtered out of that recommendation entirely.

After last week’s newsletter, a few people reached out to ask whether AI content ranks on Google. The answer is yes, it can. However, there is a massive catch. Google does not care who wrote the content, whether human or machine, but it cares deeply about why it was written and how helpful it is to the reader.

Google’s official stance as of the latest Core Update is that they reward high-quality content regardless of how it’s produced. If an AI writes a perfect, helpful guide on the best way to cook a steak, it can rank #1. If a human writes a boring, unhelpful version of the same thing, the human will lose.

It’s important to remember that AI has no senses. It hasn’t tasted your food or slept in your hotel rooms; you need to add this descriptive information in your marketing. And this is important because Google prioritises E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

If you use AI to write The Top 10 Things to Do in London and it looks exactly like every other list on the internet, you will never rank. Google’s AI Overviews will simply summarise the common knowledge and skip your link entirely.

👤 Why Guests Trust Your Data More Than Your Team

While we often hear that people distrust AI, the opposite is true for functional tasks. Guests actually prefer algorithms for accuracy and logic. This is why 56% of leisure travellers now use AI for tasks like building itineraries or comparing flight logistics. They believe a computer processes vast amounts of data more objectively than a person.

A guest will trust a chatbot to confirm if your hotel has an EV charger, what the parking charges are, or if you have a gluten-free menu. They want a fast, factual yes or no without waiting for a human to answer the phone.

But that same guest will ignore an AI recommendation for the most romantic table or a wine pairing. For experiences based on taste and emotion, they want to hear from your team.

⚠️ When Social Proof Hits a Revenue Ceiling

We hear a lot about the importance of social proof, but it’s essential to recognise that it is not universally effective in every situation for every audience.

Many people assume that showing high booking volumes or highlighting a popular choice will encourage others to buy. This applies to marketing messages like Best Seller, Our Most Popular Package, etc.

The commercial reality is different; if marketing applies a single message to every guest at every daypart, you risk pushing away valuable segments before the booking journey even begins.

Think about it, we all wear different hats in our lives. A guest might be a corporate executive on Tuesday morning but a parent on Saturday afternoon. These multiple social identities change how we react to marketing.

Evidence from the Journal of Consumer Behaviour shows that some consumers actively seek out popular trends specifically to avoid them. Are you offering something for guests who don’t want the same thing?

☹️ The Service Failures Killing Your Retention

New data shows that guest expectations before they arrive are focused most heavily on your staff. When staff expectations are not met, it triggers the most significant emotional fallout. Specifically, guests cite uninterested or unwilling staff as their primary frustration.

However, when we look at what actually stops a guest from returning, food is the focal point. Food-related complaints are the strongest predictor of a guest deciding never to return or recommend your venue. In recent studies, 36% to 40% of complaints focused specifically on the taste and quality of the food. If you fail on the plate, you lose the guest for good.

There is also a direct link between pricing and how guests perceive your team. Guests who feel they did not get value for their money primarily vent that frustration through complaints about the staff.

We see a massive trend in price-related anger when guests are asked for extra money unexpectedly. In some regions, over 90% of pricing complaints are about these hidden costs. This creates a feeling of being cheated, which immediately kills any chance of a repeat booking.

Dissatisfied guests show strong negative intentions; between 53% to 55% of unhappy guests explicitly state they will not recommend the hotel to others. Furthermore, 44% to 46% stated they will never come back.

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That is it for this edition. I hope these insights help you protect your margins and refine your decision-making as you plan for the coming month.

Managing a hospitality business is a constant balancing act between operational pressure and commercial growth. I hope this update makes that balance a little easier to navigate.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

📚 Sources

• Bell, A., The 9 Biggest Breakfast Trends In 2026 (So Far), Tasting Table (2026)

• Creator, T. L. a., A short-form web series becomes a 28-episode Netflix commission, Think Like a Creator (2026)

• Global Drinks Industry Forecast: Trends, Challenges & Innovations, Mintel (2026)

• Goodwin, D., New Google Maps features: Local Guides redesign, AI captions, photo sharing, Search Engine Land (2026)

• Hanek, K. J., & Garcia, S. M., Countering Social Information: Low Identity Integration Leads to Nonconformity in Consumption Choices, Psychology & Marketing (2026)

• Horton, H., Move over matcha: How ube cocktails and coffees are hitting the UK’s sweet spot, The Guardian (2026)

• How we’re reimagining Maps with Gemini, Google (2026)

• Logg, J. M., Minson, J. A., & Moore, D. A., Algorithm appreciation: People prefer algorithmic to human judgment, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2019)

• Mutlubaş, I., Evaluation of Online Customer Complaints for Hotel Businesses in Terms of Expectation Management and Behavioral Intention, Journal of Tourism and Gastronomy Studies (2023)

• PuzzleheadedLunch199, Pizza shop owner used AI for advertising and signage despite my protests. We got a bad review for it., R/KitchenConfidential (2026)

• Ready-to-Eat (RTE) Food Market: Growth, Trends, and Future Outlook, Futurism (2026)

• Schulte, J., Bleeker, M., & Kaufmann, P., Don’t Measure Once: Measuring Visibility in AI Search (GEO), arXiv (2026)

• Stanciuc, A.-M., Google Maps launches Ask Maps, TNW | Google (2026)

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This update is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or financial advice. Always check local regulations regarding pricing transparency and advertising standards.

In Protect Margins by Demarketing, we covered how to define demarketing and identified the three main scenarios—profitability, capacity management, and brand protection—where this strategy is essential.

In this VIP edition, you’ll learn how to identify exactly which offers are leaking profit, and how to pivot guests toward high-margin stars. Plus, you’ll get a structured testing window to move your margins safely, along with ethical guidance to protect your brand.

📄 On the Menu

• The 30-Second Margin Audit

• FOH Service Scripts

• 21-Day Demarketing Sprint

• Ethical Demarketing

• The VIP Vault

Let’s Check In ☕

⏱️ The 30-Second Margin Audit

High sales volume can mask terrible margins. If an item looks great on a spreadsheet but takes four minutes to execute during a rush - like a complex cocktail or a highly customised room package- it could be leaking profit through hidden labour costs and lost volume.

For example

The House Cocktail

• Item: Fresh Passionfruit Mojito

• Margin: Sells for £12. Ingredients cost £3. Cash profit = £9.

• Time Tax: Takes 4 full minutes to muddle, crush ice, and garnish.

• Profit Leak Test: During a Saturday rush, in those exact 4 minutes, the bartender could have poured 4 pints of premium lager with a total cash profit of £20

The Mojito is a profit leak.

It costs you £11 in lost volume and creates a queue every time it is ordered during peak hours. This is the item you need to demarket.

Use this matrix to audit your offers

Read more

If you are looking for ways to protect your profitability without constantly raising prices, you are in the right place. We need to address a common commercial drain: the disproportionate volume of low-margin offers currently being served.

With food and labour costs rising, every plate leaving your pass and every offer made must contribute its fair share to the bottom line. Allowing guests to default to your least profitable items or channels is not just a missed opportunity; it is a risk to your long-term sustainability. By the end of this guide, you will understand what Demarketing is and how to use it to steer demand toward your high-margin stars and more profitable outcomes.

📄 On the Menu

• Demarketing Defined

• When & Why You Should Demarket

• 5 Ways to Demarket Low-Profit Dishes & Protect Your Margins

• Demarketing Mistakes to Avoid

Let’s Check In ☕

📉 Demarketing Defined

Demarketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on intentionally reducing or discouraging consumer demand for a product or service, rather than attempting to expand it. The concept was developed in 1971 by Philip Kotler and Sidney Levy, who argued that.

Coping with excess demand is just as much a marketing problem as dealing with excess supply.

While the theory focuses on reversing the marketing mix, the practical application for hospitality is about maintaining the balance between volume and value.

❓ When & Why You Should Demarket

Hotels and restaurants typically use demarketing strategies in 3 main scenarios:

To increase profitability by shifting demand away from low-margin dishes

Apply this when rising food and labour costs mean specific items are no longer contributing enough to your bottom line.

For example, a restaurant notices a popular pasta dish has become a loss leader due to ingredient inflation. A hotel identifies that inclusive breakfast packages sold via third-party agents are yielding zero net margin after commission and labour costs.

To manage chronic overpopularity and preserve the customer experience

Use this tactic when consistent excess demand threatens to overwhelm your team or degrade the atmosphere of your venue.

When a venue’s demand consistently exceeds its capacity, it may demarket to reduce the strain on management and maintain its desired atmosphere.

For instance, a small, highly sought-after 30-seat restaurant in London introduces a non-refundable booking deposit to reduce no-shows and ensure only high-intent guests occupy limited seats. A resort facing high demand for its destination bar introduces a significant minimum spend or resident-only policy during peak hours to ensure staying guests can always find a table.

To protect their core clientele and maintain exclusivity

Implement this when a change in guest demographic risks alienating your primary audience or damaging your brand’s premium positioning.

A restaurant might introduce a more formal dress code or adjust the lighting and music levels to subtly signal the intended atmosphere and discourage segments that do not fit the brand profile. A luxury hotel may implement a higher minimum stay requirement, such as a three-night minimum during peak periods, to discourage party-weekend guests and ensure the property remains a calm retreat for its primary demographic.

Unlock the full library of practical playbooks and strategic updates, including:

• The No-Show Recovery Playbook Strategies to reclaim lost revenue.

• Ethical Upsell Frameworks Techniques to increase guest spend without compromising trust.

• 2026 Strategic Intelligence Monthly updates on platform shifts, AI search risks, and guest psychology.

• The VIP Vault A comprehensive archive of high-impact strategies for hotels, restaurants, and foodservice operators.

  Upgrade Today & Unlock the Vault

🛡️ 5 Ways to Demarket Low-Margin Offers & Protect Your Margins

If your margins are being squeezed by rising costs, consider these demarketing tactics.

Move low-margin items out of visual hotspots.
In a restaurant, move low-profit dishes away from the top or bottom sections of the menu. For hotels, ensure low-margin packages are removed from the homepage hero banner or the top of your digital booking engine.

Remove words that inflate appeal.
Terms like special, signature, or chef’s choice create value and should be avoided for low-margin items. Instead, tone down the description, place the item below a divider, or label it as limited to reduce its pull. For hotels, avoid using exclusive or must-try for basic room-only stays that carry high OTA commissions.

Apply scarcity cues to lower demand
Use phrases like limited availability or seasonal special to move diner or guest expectations. These cues signal that the offer may not always be available, which turns down demand without devaluing the item. Scarcity reframes the offer as an occasional option rather than a core feature, reducing repeat orders while maintaining a perception of quality.

Restrict distribution channels
Remove low-margin dishes from delivery apps like Uber Eats or Deliveroo, where they are less likely to generate profit. For hotels, apply this by closing out low-margin inventory on third-party sites during peak windows, ensuring your most profitable rooms remain available for direct bookings.

Focus marketing on high-margin offers
Avoid promoting low-profit offers in your digital or print marketing; focus entirely on high-margin items. A leaner, clearer selection reduces decision fatigue, making guests feel more confident and less overwhelmed.

🚩 Demarketing Mistakes to Avoid

Implementing a demarketing strategy requires a delicate hand and a clear head. If executed poorly, you risk damaging your brand and alienating the very guests you want to keep.

Avoid these common traps:

The Ivory Tower Effect occurs when demarketing efforts become too intense, which creates a perception of arrogance and exclusion because you stop being a host and start acting like a gatekeeper, deciding who is worthy of your service.

For example, a restaurant introduces a booking system so complex and restrictive that regular local guests feel excluded and move their custom elsewhere. A city hotel becomes so focused on vetting guests that residents feel monitored rather than hosted, leading to a sharp drop in brand sentiment.

The Backfire Effect occurs when you attempt to lower demand for a low-margin offer by making it scarce, but accidentally increase its desirability instead. This occurs if you apply scarcity cues like strictly limited but fail to remove evocative, high-value language; you end up marketing the product as a must-have.

A kitchen tries to limit a labour-intensive dessert by labelling it only 10 per night, but leaves it as a Signature Chef’s Special, causing every table to demand it. Similarly, an operator tries to reduce the high volume of low-margin Staycation Packages by limiting them to only 5 rooms per weekend while keeping the marketing copy ‘The Ultimate Signature Escape.’ Instead of turning demand away, the limited tag creates a booking frenzy, leading to guests getting frustrated when they cannot secure the exclusive deal.

Crossing Ethical Boundaries can create a toxic brand image and raise serious social and legal issues. The risk occurs when an organisation attempts to turn away specific, unwanted customer segments in a way that feels like discrimination.

For example, a restaurant might try to discourage families or younger groups by telling them there is a “£50 per head minimum spend” for those specific tables, while letting a couple sit next to them with just a coffee and a starter.

A hotel tries to discourage “budget” travellers by intentionally restricting their access to the main pool or providing significantly slower check-in service for guests who booked via a specific discount OTA. When these guests realise they are being treated as “second-class” compared to direct-booking guests, it can lead to viral negative reviews and potential legal claims of unfair treatment.

Stop guessing and start engineering.

If you are tired of marketing that doesn’t add value and want a clear path to higher margins, the VIP Edition is your next step. This week, I am releasing the Demarketing Implementation Kit to help you turn these insights into immediate P&L protection.

By joining the VIP community for just £15/month or £150/year, you gain immediate access to:

• The 30-Second Margin Audit: A simple formula to identify exactly which offers are leaking profit.

• The FOH Service Scripts: Practical pivots for your team to steer guests toward high-margin stars without sounding like a salesperson.

• The 21-Day Demarketing Sprint: A structured testing window to move your margins by 5% to 9% while avoiding the Backfire Effect.

• The Ethical Case Study: How to use Choice Architecture to protect your core demographic without crossing ethical lines.

• The VIP Vault: Immediate access to the full archive of playbooks, including the No-Show Recovery and Review Risk Management guides.

Upgrade Today

Implementing a demarketing strategy requires a delicate hand and a clear head. While it might feel counter-intuitive to actively turn demand away, remember that a leaner, more intentional offering is often a more profitable one.

By moving low-margin offers out of the spotlight and refocusing your marketing on your high-margin offers, you aren’t just protecting your profits; you are improving the guest experience by reducing decision fatigue.

Keep a close eye on your Backfire Effect and the Ivory Tower trap. If you act as a gatekeeper rather than a host, you risk losing the trust of the very guests you want to keep. Balance is everything here.

That is it for this edition. I hope you have found these insights from the VIP Vault useful for your own operations. I look forward to serving you again soon.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

📚 Sources & Resources

• Brands, Consumers, Symbols, & Research, SAGE Publications, Inc. (1999)

• Gietmann, A. L., & Hach, F. A., AUTHENTICITY THROUGH SELECTIVE DEMARKETING PRACTICES, Publication Unknown (2026)

• Gribble, D., The Menu Mistakes Draining Your Margins, Hospitality Marketing Insight (2025)

• Many tourism hotspots are ‘de‑marketing’ – with mixed success, The New Daily (2026)

• Palmedo, P. C., Dorfman, L., Garza, S., Murphy, E., & Freudenberg, N., Countermarketing Alcohol and Unhealthy Food: An Effective Strategy for Preventing Noncommunicable Diseases? Lessons from Tobacco, Annual Review of Public Health (2017)

• Saedi, A., Developing a demarketing model to improve environmental sustainability behaviours in the electricity company, New Marketing Research Journal (2025)

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In our previous guide, How to Spot and Kill AI Slop, we looked at identifying low-quality automated content, protecting your search rankings, and keeping your brand voice human.

In this VIP edition, you will learn how to build a high-level strategic AI stack, protect your proprietary brand data, and generate original content that earns guest trust.

You can achieve this without the high cost of traditional agencies or the endless hours usually spent on manual content creation.

📄 On the Menu

• The Cost of AI Slop

• How to Create Slop-Free Content

• Using AI as an Accelerator

Let’s Check In ☕

💸 The Cost of AI Slop

While the promise of generative AI was one of infinite productivity, the reality is the rapid degradation of our information ecosystem. We are entering the era of workslop, content that is polished, structurally correct, and perfectly formatted, yet entirely interchangeable and superficial. This mass-produced noise does more than just clutter feeds; it actively displaces high-quality material, fuels misinformation, and threatens the livelihoods of genuine creators by crowding them out of the digital spaces they built.

For hospitality brands and professional creators, the cost of this slop is a measurable drain on brand equity, trust and visibility.

33% of consumers believe AI usage negatively impacts brand perception

and

43% of consumers are less likely to buy from brands they perceive as over-relying on AI-generated content.

Beyond consumer sentiment, search engines have become aggressive filters. Google now penalises unoriginal content that merely rewrites existing online information. Their systems are tuned to reward Information Gain content that provides new data, first-hand expertise, or unique perspectives. If your output is just a re-hash of the top 10 search results, the algorithm will treat it as invisible noise.

🧠 How to Create Slop-Free Content

I hear the same questions across Reddit and professional forums every day:

How can I make AI content look authentic?
Can I really create high-end assets on a shoestring budget?
Is it possible to use AI for strategy without sounding like a corporate robot?

The fear of producing slop is completely understandable, but with the right process and a shift in mindset, creating content with AI can be incredibly cost-effective and creatively rewarding.

Many people mistakenly use AI simply as a glorified search engine, a way to fetch facts or summarise text. However, its true value lies in using it as a thinking partner. When used correctly, AI can act as a sophisticated sounding board that doesn’t just generate text, but actually helps you predict the outcome of campaigns and stress-test your strategy before you spend a penny on distribution.

By treating AI as a collaborator rather than a replacement, you maintain the human nuance that guests crave while using the machine’s scale to keep your content production lean. Here’s How

Read more

We’re all used to digital slop. Since the birth of the internet, we’ve been subjected to clip-art figures shaking hands, banner ads blinking in neon loops, and WordArt titles proudly curving across PowerPoint slides.

But what we’re seeing now is a different beast entirely. The rapid proliferation of low-quality, mass-produced AI-generated content has triggered a significant backlash known as AI Slop. In 2026, research shows that AI-generated material now constitutes 64% of all newly published content, outpacing human-created work by a staggering 17 to 1.

As a result, we are witnessing the birth of Banner Blindness for Ideas. Just as we learned to physically ignore the right-hand side of websites in the 2000s, slop is training people to subconsciously ignore entire categories of information. If a post looks like a generic AI listicle or sounds like a ChatGPT-standard greeting, the human brain now filters it out before it’s even processed.

Brands using AI as a shortcut for creative output should be aware that it can severely damage their reputation and customer trust, as purely AI-generated content is systematically ignored or penalised by search and answer engines.

📄 On the Menu

• The Problem with AI Slop

• Combatting AI Content Fatigue

• How to Spot AI Slop

• Top of the Slops - Mistakes to Avoid

Let’s Check In ☕

📉 The Problem with AI Slop

People are tired of being sold to by a machine. I’m seeing a massive move toward Dark Social, such as private groups and gated chats simply because the open web has become a dumpster for low-quality, synthetic filler.

Content farms use AI to mass-produce articles with little originality or value, cluttering search engine results. On average, 94,000 articles per day, each, contributing to a 312% increase in spam-related content removal actions taken by Google compared to 2023 figures. This makes it harder for users to find reliable, high-quality content, reducing trust in digital media.

As a direct consequence, search engines are already adjusting algorithms to prioritise human-created content, but distinguishing between AI and human writing is becoming increasingly difficult.

And it’s not just copy, AI is used to create the estimated 79% of images on Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest. On social media, approximately 50% of brand posts are AI-assisted, from core ideas to captions.

For a time-strapped operator, the appeal of generative AI is clear. Research shows 70% of marketers in the UK and US use generative AI to save 5 hours per week.

But for many operators, the drive for efficiency has become a trap. While the cost to produce 1,000 words of content is now essentially zero, the cost to verify those words is increasing. It still requires human time to ensure information is accurate and safe.

I’m seeing a trend where marketers spend more time fixing synthetic outputs than they would have spent creating them from scratch. But when your marketing sounds like the other 90% of the web, you lose the ability to differentiate your brand and/or offer.

😫 Combatting AI Content Fatigue

Your guests now spend more mental energy filtering out irrelevant information than they do actually consuming your message. In the past, the burden was on the creator to make something worth seeing. Today, that burden is on the consumer to validate what is real.

If your brand sounds like the global average of the internet, you’re paying a Bland Tax you can’t afford. When a guest senses that overly smooth AI tone, they switch off.

This change has created AI content fatigue. It is a form of digital burnout caused by a constant bombardment of bland, low-quality content that lacks a human perspective.

To understand why this happens, we look at Cognitive Load Theory and the mental energy a person has available to process information. When content is fragmented or repetitive, it drains that energy. The resulting exhaustion makes it harder for them to make a conscious decision, such as booking a table or a room.

The human brain is beginning to filter out common AI structures subconsciously. When a guest sees phrases like in the ever-evolving landscape or unlock your potential, they mentally switch off.

Because AI models reflect the average of all data, they produce average results.

As machines learn to sound like the average person, generative AI is losing its ability to identify true experiences. This has created a trust gap. Frustrated by AI slop audiences are actively seeking out authentic sources. We are seeing a renaissance in traditional content formats, such as long-form interviews and podcasts, where guests can find genuine human engagement.

Coming Up in This week’s VIP guide
How to Protect Your Brand From Google's AI Content Penalties

It deconstructs everything I know about eliminating AI slop and protecting your brand equity; it’s like having a CMO in your inbox, helping you move beyond basic prompts to high-level strategic thinking.

You’ll get a clear 7-phase system to move AI from a basic generator to a strategic content creation partner.

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🕵️ How to Spot AI Slop

How many lights can you spot?

The human capacity for detecting synthetic content is rapid and instinctive. MIT neuroscientists found that the human brain can process and identify entire images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds. This suggests that the gut feeling a user has when an image feels off occurs almost instantly on sight.

While a lot of AI is obvious and I can easily spot a lot of it …, it gets too exhausting trying to analyse every freaking post to know whether I can trust it’s real or not, and then ultimately trust nothing, so I close out.

That uncomfortable gut feeling is often called the uncanny valley, where a guest feels something is not quite right. It often relates to content that is almost human but feels slightly strange, causing immediate distrust.

Even when users cannot prove a post is synthetic, the instinctive discomfort remains. This leads to a profound commercial risk, as 43% of people are less likely to buy from brands they perceive as over-reliant on AI.

Impact on Brand Trust

This change in user sentiment carries a heavy price for your revenue and brand performance. When guests spot these patterns, they don’t just lose interest; they actively distrust the offer, as the figures below confirm:

The sentiment data is clear: audiences have an instant and instinctive resistance to synthetic content. To protect your brand from being ignored, you must understand the specific linguistic patterns that signal a lack of human oversight.

✍️ Keywords and Phrases

Users are becoming increasingly adept at recognising AI-generated copy. The language tends to be excessively smooth, correct, and safe. It reads like polished corporate language designed to avoid any potential controversy, which can strip away the personality of your brand.

Slop frequently relies on generic statements and vague formulations, offering little more than repackaged information without contributing any new insights or fresh angles to the discussion.

This is the very opposite of Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) standards. By providing only interchangeable information, you fail to prove the unique experience or expert authority of your venue.

Here are some of the most overused AI phrases.

🖼️ Image Errors

While most creative directors are worried about copyright or losing the human touch, they are missing the systemic flattening of the creative imagination, what some theorists are calling Aesthetic Alienation.

Is this how we hold burgers now?

In visual media and advertising, audiences spot slop when the final imagery feels rushed, lazy, or soulless. Because AI lacks inherent human taste, judgment, and contextual understanding, its raw outputs immediately signal AI to viewers.

🎬 Video Tells

In video production, these errors become even more obvious as motion reveals the lack of a consistent physical framework.

The Coca-Cola Christmas Backlash of 2024

In 2024, Coca-Cola faced significant public backlash after releasing an AI-generated Christmas advert.

The advert features an AI-generated fleet of red trucks moving through snowy landscapes and festive villages. Animals, including squirrels and polar bears, appear throughout the scenes. Notably, the ad avoids showing a live-action Santa; he is represented only by a hyper-realistic close-up of his face and a brief glimpse of a hand holding a bottle.

To avoid the uncanny valley problem, the 2025 ad focused more on animals like polar bears and pandas, and less time on human faces.

Analysts estimate that generative AI tools cut the production cost of such large-scale ads (typically $1M to $3M) by up to 70%.

While Coca-Cola leadership viewed the campaign as a transformational leap, utilising tools like Google Veo to achieve craftsmanship they claimed was ten times better than previous experiments, the public disagreed.

The campaign was viewed as a direct contradiction to the heritage of Coca-Cola’s Real Magic and Real Thing brand pillars.

Despite the high production volume, the video is full of technical glitches, such as flickering, inconsistent overhead lights and trucks that change shape between frames.

This backlash from the creative community wasn’t just about the aesthetics; it was a reaction to perceived corporate laziness. By releasing a campaign that prioritised speed and cost-cutting over human craftsmanship during a period of intense job anxiety, Coca-Cola turned its back on the very authenticity it has spent decades building. The result was a PR disaster that proves technical efficiency is no substitute for emotional resonance.

This failure at the top of the market serves as a warning for every hospitality operator. While you may not be producing global TV spots, the same rules apply to your daily output. To avoid your own New Coke moment, you need a practical framework to identify and remove the technical tells that trigger this instinctive guest rejection.

Your brand is being buried alive by Workslop - interchangeable, superficial noise that crowds out genuine creators. If your output is just a re-hash of the top 10 search results, the algorithm treats it as invisible noise.

The Hospitality Content Quality System is your weapon to fight back, protecting your proprietary data and ensuring your business stays compliant.

Protect Your Brand - Buy Now

🏆 Top of the Slops - Mistakes to Avoid

Identifying AI slop in your marketing comes down to two primary commercial failures: losing your unique brand identity to an algorithm and overlooking the human creativity that guests actually trust.

👥 Losing Your Identity

When hotel or restaurant marketing loses its uniqueness, it becomes indistinguishable from other venues.

As AI search engines increasingly act as the new gatekeepers of the internet, they are actively conditioning themselves to filter out and ignore bland, average, or generic content. If a brand produces content that simply repackages what already exists in the top search results, it pays a severe invisible penalty. The February 2026 Google Core Update has formalised this penalty, specifically targeting the mass-produced patterns of AI slop to ensure that lazy, unoriginal content is stripped from search results.

The implication is that artificial intelligence, by its very nature, produces a kind of cultural residue, content without culture.

If your brand produces content that simply repackages what already exists in the top search results, you pay a severe invisible penalty. Because your content offers nothing new, AI systems will:

• Filter you out of the synthesised answers entirely.

• Ignore your brand in favour of sources with unique, proprietary data.

• Summarise your work without attribution, effectively turning your intellectual property into free training data for your competitors.

❤️ Overlooking Human Concerns & Creativity

While AI can process information and automate tasks rapidly, relying on it as a content creator rather than a collaborative tool leads to several detrimental outcomes. For a start, this reliance strips work of its authenticity, nuance, and original value, turning your brand into ignorable digital noise.

Rather than streamlining complex tasks, an over-reliance on these tools creates a Cognitive Strain Cycle. When professionals lean too heavily on AI outputs, especially when already experiencing mental fatigue, they fall victim to automation bias. They stop evaluating, stop questioning, and start blindly accepting synthetic outputs. This doesn’t relieve pressure; it exacerbates exhaustion and compromises the integrity of the work.

Many creative professionals feel that AI is negatively impacting their day-to-day roles. Marketers have noted that content creation is turning into content supervision. One user lamented that AI is slowly killing the strategist in me.

When you replace human creative direction with AI supervision, you lose the ability to predict cultural shifts. AI only knows what happened yesterday; it cannot invent tomorrow.

How to Protect Your Brand From AI Blindness

It is a strange paradox: the more content we produce with AI, the less our audience sees. We are creating a digital environment where the average is effectively invisible. My VIP guide provides the behavioural tweaks necessary to bypass this new Banner Blindness

By taking the time to understand the ‘slop’ vs. ‘substance’ divide today, you’re already making the choice to lead rather than just contribute to the noise. I hope these insights give you the resolve to keep your standards high and your voice unapologetically human.

That’s it for this edition. I hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter. I look forward to serving you again soon.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

Audit Your Way Back to Being Remarkable

AI Slop is training people to ignore entire categories;
don't let your brand be one of them.

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📚 Sources & Resources

• Arnone, D., AI Fatigue: The Cost of AI Overuse, Neodata (2026)

• Coca Cola’s AI-Generated Ad Controversy, Explained, Forbes (2024)

• D’Isa, F., The Idea of ‘AI Slop’ Is Slop, The Philosophical Salon (2025)

• Goodwin, D., The hidden ‘bland tax’ that could erase your brand from AI search, Search Engine Land (2026)

• Hui, X., Reshef, O., & Zhou, L., The Short-Term Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Employment: Evidence from an Online Labor Market, Social Science Research Network (2023)

• In the blink of an eye, MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2014)

• jumpmanpapi23, Coca Cola and the huge backlash from people about them using AI in their ads, r/Advertising (2026)

• Khan, S. M. F. A., & Suhluli, S., Generative AI and Cognitive Challenges in Research: Balancing Cognitive Load, Fatigue, and Human Resilience, Technologies (2025)

• Marianantoni, A., Content Marketing in the AI Era: Strategies for Startup Success, M ACCELERATOR by M Studio (2025)

• MetaKnowing, AI ‘slop’ is transforming social media—And a backlash is brewing, r/Technology (2026)

• Mueller, J., Advocate, S., & Google, Google’s February 2026 Discover Core Update, Google Search Central Blog (2026)

• Nemeroff, A., What is AI slop? A technologist explains this new and largely unwelcome form of online content, The Conversation (2025)

• Ott, A., Is AI content fatigue setting in?, EY (2026)

• Reporter’s Guide to Detecting AI-Generated Content, GIJN (2026)

• The 2026 AI Index Report, Stanford HAI (2026)

• TOP 20 AI-GENERATED CONTENT STATISTICS 2026 THAT REVEAL SHOCKING GLOBAL AI CONTENT EXPLOSION, Amra & Elma (2025)

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In The 2026 Report on Culinary Tourism, we brought you up to date on how to spot gaps in the market, the biggest culinary tourism opportunities, and the key subcultures to market toward.

In this VIP Edition, you’ll learn how to own the 80% of guests who book specifically for the food, convert subculture psychology into direct revenue, and capture your share of the $7.7 trillion Halal market—giving you the precision targeting needed to secure 2026 bookings without the trial and error of generic campaigns.

📄 On the Menu

• 2026 Culinary Tourism Trends

• Culinary Tourist Buyer Journeys

• Emerging Trends

• Culinary Marketing Action Plan

Let’s Check In ☕

🛣️ 2026 Culinary Tourism Trends

🗺️ Regional Dynamics

While the global culinary landscape is expanding, current revenue is concentrated in a few powerhouse regions. Europe continues to hold its position as the spiritual and economic heart of the market, accounting for between 32.18% and 35.1% of the global share. This dominance, which generates up to €250 billion annually, is built on a foundation of mature infrastructure, protected heritage designations, and highly subsidised agritourism networks.

Asia-Pacific is currently the fastest-growing market on the planet. It has already captured a massive 43.1% of the holistic revenue share, injecting approximately $400 billion into the global economy. Driven by the meteoric rise in street food culture in nations like Thailand and the deep traditions of Japan and China, APAC’s growth is moving at a CAGR of up to 16%.

In the Americas, the United States remains a heavy hitter, generating up to $150 billion in economic output. Looking further south, Latin America is on a steady climb, projected to reach $150 billion by 2028. Meanwhile, the Middle East is aggressively positioning itself as the new frontier for luxury dining; countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi are utilising state funding to launch new gastronomic destinations under the MICHELIN umbrella.

👣 Tour Structure

The average culinary-focused trip now lasts 5-6 days, with travellers hitting an average of 3-4 dedicated food destinations during their stay.

🔥 The 2026 Culinary Tourism Hotlist

Here are the destinations successfully turning their local landscapes into bookable experiences.

If you’re not a VIP subscriber, you’re currently missing the most critical part of the report. Get the Action Plan now to reclaim the 25% F&B budget leak
before your guests spend it elsewhere.

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Culinary travel is now forecasted to reach upwards of $4.25 trillion by 2034, with nearly 80% of global travellers now categorising food and beverage as important or very important when choosing a destination. Putting food and beverages on the same foundational level as pricing and location.

On average, tourists are now allocating 25% of their total travel budget specifically to food and beverages.

Many travellers now find more cultural value in a local grocery aisle than in a generic hotel breakfast buffet. If your food offering feels like it could be anywhere in the world, you lose the destination spend to local shops.

One of the most profound changes in 2026 is the mainstreaming of Halal tourism, now part of a $7.7 trillion global Islamic economy. With 70% of this population under age 40, they aren’t just looking for food; they are looking for inclusivity—from prayer facilities to alcohol-free environments.

According to data from Hilton’s 2025 Trend Report, 64% of travellers now explicitly prefer unique local experiences over traditional fine dining. Furthermore, 66% of travellers report being most excited by street food.

When guests view your venue as disconnected from the local culture, they treat your hotel as a bed, not a destination. You lose the ancillary spend. You lose the opportunity to capture that 25% of their travel budget dedicated to food and drink.

📄 On the Menu

• Culinary Tourism Opportunities

• Culinary Tourist Key Personas

• Hyperlocalism and Sustainable Marketing

Let’s Check In ☕

An American Express survey found that 81% of travellers look forward to food experiences when abroad, with the highest interest in:

• Discovering the local restaurant scene 54%

• Food festivals 46%

• Local food tours 41%

• Wine tastings 39%

• Dining with live entertainment 38%

• Brewery tours 34%

• Chef tasting menus 31%

• Cooking classes 22%

Operators are already building food into every package and promotion. If you want your venue to compete, you need to do the same.

🍴 Culinary Tourism Opportunities

Before you can design campaigns or packages, you need to know what travellers are already asking for. The table below provides a simple framework for researching real demand into the latest culinary travel trends.

Remember - Guesswork wastes budget.

Once you have gathered your external data, the goal is to find the gap between what the town currently offers and what the data says travellers actually want.

📊 Spotting the Market Patterns

In a hotel, the research might show that guests are searching for your town and looking for specific experiences like a seashore foraging walk or a vineyard tour. If people are searching for these terms but your town only offers standard rooms and a basic bar, they will take their money to the next town. You are losing the booking because you have not packaged the local landscape into a stay.

For a restaurant, the pattern is usually visible in the search trends. If the diner is looking for local crab or heritage oysters and seeing high engagement on those posts, but every restaurant in town is serving frozen cod and chips, they will skip the high street and go to a coastal shack instead. There is a clear commercial gap to be the first venue that puts those specific, trending local ingredients on a premium menu.

Why Market Leaders are Upgrading

With culinary travel forecasted to reach $4.25 trillion, your prestige now rests on the plate rather than the pillow. Join the elite cohort of hospitality professionals who use our monthly strategic updates to justify premium pricing and secure high-margin bookings—without the agency fee. It is the only way to ensure your brand remains a destination of choice in 2026.

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🍕 Culinary Tourists Key Personas

As you conduct your research, you’ll start to notice patterns of behaviour in different groups, each driven by different motivations and desires.

🍃 Escapists

Escapists are travellers who use food as a pathway to reset and restore. Their focus is on wellbeing, comfort, and experiences that feel mindful rather than rushed. They gravitate towards destinations offering wellness retreats, farm-to-table dining, and menus that highlight balance and authenticity.

Escapists are prepared to spend on quality, but their decisions are guided less by status and more by emotional return. Their discovery often begins with long-form inspiration on platforms like Pinterest or through blogs and editorial features, where they can linger over stories and imagery that connect food with relaxation and renewal.

🌟 Prestige Seekers

Prestige Seekers view food as a marker of status and exclusivity. Their itineraries are built around high-spend experiences, from Michelin-starred tasting menus to luxury chef’s tables and rare ingredients. A location’s reputation influences destination choice in fine dining, wine, or high-end gastronomy.

Among luxury travellers, 60% specifically seek hotels known for top-tier dining – the hotel restaurant has become as important as the room.

This group spends at the top end of the spectrum and expects exclusivity and access that others cannot buy. They are heavily influenced by visually aspirational content on Instagram and by curated features in luxury media, often using these platforms to signal their experiences as much as to plan them.

🧭 Explorers

Explorers are motivated by novelty, risk, and discovery. For them, food is an adventure, and the more unusual, narrative-rich, or off-the-grid the experience, the better. They chase street food, underground dining, and pop-up concepts, choosing destinations that promise originality rather than predictability.

Explorers are mid- to high-spending, but their budgets follow excitement rather than luxury labels. TikTok and other short-form video platforms play a central role in their planning, as the immediacy of video allows them to gauge authenticity, atmosphere, and the story behind each meal before committing.

🤳 Connectors

Connectors see food as a bridge to memory, culture, and community. They are motivated by nostalgia, heritage, and the pull of diaspora ties, seeking out experiences that remind them of home or that deepen their understanding of cultural identity.

Connectors favour heritage restaurants, local festivals, and menus that celebrate comfort and tradition. Their spending profile is steady and reliable, often family-oriented, and they tend to become repeat guests when they find a place that resonates. Their discovery is shaped by trusted channels such as email loyalty campaigns, cultural newsletters, and community-based storytelling, where the message feels personal and grounded.

Turn Your Marketing Symptoms into Solved Problems

Hospitality marketing usually fails through a thousand small cuts. Whethere its inconsistent messaging, inaccurate social profiles, or dead-end website journeys.

Use our Expert Diagnostic Tool to uncover the “why” behind low bookings and the Quality System to ensure every piece of content converts. It is the most practical £45 you will spend this financial year.

Eliminate Marketing Friction

📍 Hyper-Localism & Sustainability

One of the main trends seen across all segments is that travellers increasingly expect menus to showcase hyperlocal ingredients and region-specific recipes that offer an authentic taste of place.

Restaurants and food tours worldwide are embracing farm-to-table and even ocean-to-plate sourcing, with chefs redefining local cuisine by foraging and sourcing directly from their surroundings.

78% of travellers say they crave fresh, unique flavours over the familiar, and 61% want to learn about the origins of a destination’s iconic dishes as part of their trip

Hotels are responding by growing herbs and vegetables on-site, while tour itineraries include visits to local markets, farm stays, and experiences led by producers.

Reduced food miles, visible community contributions, and transparent sourcing signal that sustainability is not just a marketing claim, but part of the brand itself.

When delivered well, hyperlocal sourcing becomes a powerful differentiator.

✅ What To Do

• Make provenance visible - Don’t just list local on the menu. Name the farm, the producer, the day’s catch. Then extend it into short-form video, supplier spotlights, and chef-led storytelling. Guests will use this content as their own proof point when choosing you over a competitor.

• Turn seasonality into campaigns. - Build limited-time menus or experiences around what’s in season this month. Position it as get it now or miss it to drive bookings in soft periods. Harvest calendars and tide tables become marketing assets when used correctly.

• Sell sustainability as identity, not apology. - Too many venues treat eco-efforts as an afterthought. Integrate hyperlocal sourcing into loyalty programmes, email subject lines, and PR hooks so it becomes part of why people book with you. It’s not just ethical, it’s a commercial positioning.

On Thursday, we reveal exactly how the modern Culinary Tourist decides where to eat — along with a step-by-step Action Plan to convert them.

The move in how people travel for food is a significant commercial opportunity for those who act first. By looking at search trends and social data now, you can position your venue as the primary destination for 2026 while others are still trying to figure out why their generic menus are failing.

Identifying these market patterns is the first step toward securing a new revenue stream. It ensures you are not just a place to sleep or a convenient meal, but the very reason the guest chooses your town over the next one.

That’s it for this edition. I hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter. I look forward to serving you again soon.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

The pace of modern marketing makes it difficult to see what is actually working. Campaigns run, but the link between activity and revenue is often unclear. My bespoke marketing audits provide a data-led approach to fix this. I identify exactly where performance breaks down and what needs to change.

These bespoke audits deliver clear commercial direction:

• Pinpoint weaknesses in your digital strategy to upgrade marketing performance.

• Identify reputation risks to strengthen trust and increase conversion.

• Map your customer journey to improve retention, spend, and loyalty.

Secure your audit before you allocate your next quarter's marketing budget.

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📚 Sources & Resources

• 2024 Trends Report: What Millennials, Gen Z, Gen X and Baby Boomers Tell Us About Travel in the Year Ahead, Stories From Hilton, 2025.

• Adam, Travels of Adam Hipster Blog, 2025. Where Foodies Should Travel in 2025: A New Study Says New Zealand Surprise!.

• Culinary Tourism Market 2025 – Industry Overview, The Business Research Company, 2025.

• Culinary Tourism Market Size, Statistics & Forecast, IMARC Group, 2025.

• Food-Focused Journeys: Culinary Travel Trends for 2025, The World’s Greatest Vacations, 2025.

• Niche to mainstream: Evolution of Halal tourism in global travel industry, Al Jazeera (2025)

• Travel Trends: Luxury Culinary Tourism, Bedsonline, 2025.

• WiT, WiT, 2025. Did you know 50% of travellers book restaurants before their flight? Surprising trends shaping 2025 travel

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In The Psychology Behind Summer Guest Spend, we covered how heat-driven decision-making, visual triggers, and expectation gaps shape guest behaviour. In this VIP edition, you’ll learn how to respond to high-pressure reviews, protect your reputation, and reduce team workload without adding more time, stress, or operational complexity.

📄 On the Menu

• The High-Stakes Reality of Summer Reviews

• How to Handle Negative Reviews with EASE

• How to TIP Positive Reviews

• Download the Hospitality Review Response Pack

Let’s Check In ☕

🔥 The High-Stakes Reality of Summer Reviews

When reviews go wrong during the summer rush, speed and tone matter more than ever. A single negative review can feel like a punch in the gut, especially when your team is working at full capacity.

Because guests view their summer holidays as an extension of their identity, a service failure feels like a personal slight. They will externalise this discomfort by sharing their negative experience widely. Managers currently spend an average of 3–5 hours per week dealing with review disputes, reporting fake accounts, and responding to trolls. This is “lost time” that should be spent on the guest experience.

See exactly how to respond before one review costs you repeat bookings.

These responses are structured to reduce escalation, acknowledge the guest’s emotional state, and move the interaction away from public conflict.

Read more

In summer, guest behaviour changes faster than most marketing can keep up. As attention drops and physical discomfort rises, guests are not browsing in the same way; they are scanning for fast relief, easy decisions, and marketing they can trust. The problem is commercial: if your marketing does not align with these behaviours, you lose bookings to brands that reduce friction faster and trigger action sooner.

This matters now because summer compresses decision windows. Guests move quickly, expectations run high, and the gap between promise and delivery creates immediate fallout in spend, reviews, and return intent.

In this issue, you will see how summer psychology shapes booking behaviour, what triggers action, and the commercial risks.

📄 On the Menu

• Predictive Processing and Visual Hunger

• The Halo Effect in Summer Marketing

• The Endowment and Framing Effects

• Identity and The Peak-End Rule

• VIP Exclusive Preview

Let’s Check In ☕

🍹 Predictive Processing and Visual Hunger

“You eat with your eyes” is more than a saying; it is a neurological reality. As we approach the summer window, every venue starts posting sunshine and salads. To stand out, we need to move past aesthetic vibes and tap into Predictive Processing, the way the human brain anticipates a reward.

When a fatigued, overheated guest sees a short-form video of a beaded, iced cocktail or a shaded, breezy terrace, their brain physically anticipates the relief. In a hospitality context, this creates an immediate anticipatory reward.

The strategic goal here is to engineer visual hunger, a physiological and psychological state of craving triggered strictly by what the eyes see.

In hospitality, it’s about the visual consumption of the entire experience. It applies to a cold glass of Rosé, the texture of a linen-set table in the sun, or a clear blue pool. It’s the “I want to be there“ reflex.

• Condensation on glassware: A close-up of a chilled bottle or cocktail triggers an immediate thirst response.

• Environmental texture: Sunlight hitting a patio or a perfectly set table creates a desire for the physical space.

• Action shots: A sauce being poured or a steak being carved focus attention on the immediate sensory reward.

High-quality visual cues act as a mental shortcut. When a guest sees a powerful sensory image, their brain pre-processes the experience. This builds anticipation and reduces the friction between seeing an ad and clicking ‘book’.

✨ The Halo Effect in Summer Marketing

If your marketing heavily promotes one exceptional summer attribute, like the coolest rooftop pool or the most attentive poolside service, guests will automatically assume the rest of your facilities operate to the same exacting standard of excellence. This is known as the halo effect.

How to apply the halo effect

The commercial goal is to lead with your strongest summer asset to raise the perceived value of your entire offering.

• Identify your “Anchor” asset: This is the one feature—a sunset terrace, a specific seasonal cocktail, or an outdoor pool—that guests consistently photograph and share.

• Prioritise high-end production here: Allocate your photography budget to this single asset. When the quality of this one element looks exceptional, guests mentally apply that “premium” filter to your rooms, service, and menu.

• Audit the surrounding journey: Ensure the path from this high-quality image to the booking engine is frictionless. If the halo creates the desire, the booking process must not break the spell with technical hurdles.

By focusing your marketing spend on your most visually potent asset, you create a commercial shortcut to trust.

However, when the reality of a stay or meal falls short of the expectations set, it creates a psychological mismatch, where the experience contradicts the guest’s decision to trust the brand.

Because hospitality choices are closely tied to identity, this failure feels personal.

Guests feel exposed, let down, or embarrassed. When this narrative breaks, guests rarely complain to give you a chance to fix the issue; instead, they withdraw. They experience buyer’s remorse, question the value of the purchase, and are highly likely to share their negative experience widely.

Failing to uphold the reality behind a marketing halo erodes long-term trust and reduces the likelihood of return visits. And how you present that experience in the first place determines how easily that trust is won or lost.

🎁 The Endowment and Framing Effects

In summer, the same offer can feel irresistible or completely forgettable, depending on how you present it. The framing effect is the psychological principle that the way information is presented fundamentally shapes how people interpret and act on it.

Think about it for a moment, framing a package as “Complimentary late summer check-out” is far more enticing than “Flexible departure times”.

• The “All-Inclusive” Frame: Guests perceive a £250 “Summer Experience” package as higher value than a £180 room + £40 dinner + £30 breakfast. Even though the price is the same, framing it as a single, curated experience removes the “pain of paying” for individual items.

• The Scarcity Frame: “Only 4 terrace tables remaining for Friday sunset” frames the booking as a win over other guests. It changes the perspective from “should I go out?” to “will I miss out on the best spot?”

• The Comparative Frame: Presenting a “House Spritz” at £12 next to a “Premium Vintage Spritz” at £18. The £12 drink is now framed as the sensible, value-driven choice, rather than just an expensive cocktail.

Framing should provide the guest with a mental win. It replaces the friction of spending money with the satisfaction of securing a deal or an exclusive opportunity. You are essentially giving them the justification they need to say yes to themselves.

Framing is a powerful tool for setting expectations, but it becomes a commercial liability if the operational reality cannot meet the marketing promise.

• The Over-Promise Trap: If you frame a standard double room as a “Luxury Summer Sanctuary,” the guest arrives with a heightened set of expectations. When the physical reality is just “standard,” the guest feels let down. The negative impact of that disappointment is far greater than if you had framed the room accurately from the start.

• The Complexity Penalty: If your framing is too complex—such as a “Credits-based Summer Package” where guests have to calculate what they can spend—it creates mental fatigue. Instead of feeling like they secured a deal, the guest feels they are being forced to work for their holiday.

• The Trust Deficit: If a guest discovers that the “Exclusive Member Rate” you framed as a special privilege is actually available on every public booking site, the frame breaks. You haven’t just lost the “win” for the guest; you’ve signalled that your brand is unreliable.

Effective framing must be grounded in operational truth. Use it to highlight your strengths, not to mask your weaknesses. When you align your marketing frame with your operational delivery, you protect both your margins and your reputation.

Once a guest visualises having that perk or benefit, the endowment effect takes over. This is a cognitive bias where individuals place a significantly higher value on something simply because they feel a sense of ownership over it. This is why personalisation in marketing is so important.

Once a guest begins to imagine themselves in your space—prompted by your imagery and framing—they develop a psychological sense of ownership. In their mind, that specific terrace table or room is already theirs.

The endowment effect occurs when the booking process starts. Because they already own the experience in their head, abandoning the booking feels like a loss. They are no longer just browsing; they are defending something they feel belongs to them.

The Commercial Risk

The risk with creating a sense of ownership is that it makes the guest highly sensitive to changes. When a guest feels they already “own” a specific experience, any perceived reduction in quality or service feels like a personal theft.

• The “Bait and Switch” Trap: If you market a specific terrace table to build ownership, but seat the guest in a windowless corner upon arrival, the endowment effect reverses. The guest feels they have lost something that belonged to them, leading to immediate dissatisfaction and negative reviews.

• The Hidden Cost Penalty: If a guest mentally owns a “£150 stay,” adding unexpected resort fees or service charges at checkout feels like you are taking money back from them. This triggers a stronger negative emotional response than if the price had been higher from the start.

• The Accuracy Gap: If your “Visual Hunger” imagery shows a premium cocktail garnish that is missing when the drink arrives, the guest feels the experience they “bought” has been downgraded.

When the endowment effect is broken, you don’t just lose a sale; you lose the guest’s trust. They feel the brand has failed to protect the experience they were promised.

🧍 Identity and The Peak-End Rule

When customers choose a hotel or restaurant for their summer holiday, they are making an identity choice that aligns with their values. They are booking the “perfect summer” to signal their taste and lifestyle to their peers. When a hospitality brand aligns with a guest’s self-concept, it becomes a way for them to say, “I’m the kind of person who stays here.”

In a hospitality context, identity is not formed by the transaction; it is formed by the social and self-signalling value of the choice. A guest chooses your venue because it acts as a mirror to how they want the world to perceive them.

• Aspirational Alignment: During summer, guests are more likely to seek “peak” experiences that validate their success or taste. If your marketing highlights exclusivity or a specific aesthetic, the guest adopts that quality as part of their own narrative.

• Social Currency: The choice of venue provides the guest with content—both digital and verbal—to share with their peers. This “social proofing” reinforces their identity as an explorer, a connoisseur, or a provider for their family.

• Consistency Principle: Once a guest identifies as “the kind of person who stays here,” they are psychologically driven to remain loyal to that choice. To change venues would be to admit a change in their own self-concept.

The Commercial Value of Identity

When you align your brand with a guest’s identity, you move beyond price sensitivity. Guests are willing to pay a premium to protect their self-image. Your job is to provide the consistent, high-quality cues that allow them to keep saying,

“This is who I am.”

However, when a brand underdelivers against its promise, the guest internalises the failure. They do not simply feel let down by the venue; they feel let down by their own judgment. This emotional cost increases if the booking involves other people, such as a date or group, where the experience reflects directly on them.

This mismatch triggers cognitive dissonance, pushing the guest into self-protection and withdrawal. In most cases, they disengage completely and are likely to warn others about their experience.

Because of this emotional investment, the peak-end rule becomes critical.

Understanding the Peak-End Rule

People remember experiences based on two specific moments: the peak moment, the most intense part of the experience, and the end moment, the final interaction. This means guests are not judging the full experience evenly; they are anchoring their memory to these two points.

The Peak is the moment of maximum emotional intensity during the guest journey. In summer, this is rarely the check-in or the payment; it is the specific moment that justifies the cost of the trip.

• The Sensory Anchor: For a beach resort, the peak might be the first five minutes on a poolside lounger with a drink. For a city restaurant, it’s the arrival of a signature sharing platter when the atmosphere is at its height.

• The “Instagram” Moment: Operationally, you can identify the peak by looking at when guests reach for their phones. This is the moment they are most engaged and most likely to form a lasting memory.

• The Emotional Payoff: It is the point where the Visual Hunger and Framing you used in your marketing finally meet the physical reality.

The End is not just the act of paying the bill or handing back a key. It is the final transition from guest back to consumer. Nailing the checkout and departure experience is just as important as the welcome.

If the peak moment falls flat or the ending is rushed, stressful, or poorly handled, that negative moment dominates the guest’s memory of the entire visit.

A guest will forgive a slow check-in if the stay is great, but they rarely forgive a slow check-out.

If the final interaction involves a dispute over a bill, a long wait for a porter, or an indifferent “goodbye” from a distracted staff member, that frustration becomes the dominant memory.

You could deliver a 5-star experience for 47 hours, but a 1-star final hour will be the version that appears in their TripAdvisor review. To protect your reputation, you must ensure the final 5% of the guest journey is as well-resourced as the Peak.

Summer bookings are tied to a guest’s identity. This is why complaints during this season feel so personal. When the experience fails to match what they imagined, the guest isn’t just disappointed with your venue; they feel let down by their own choice. This blow to their self-image is why summer reviews are often so emotional and why the reputational damage is so high.

All the best

Dawn Gribble MIH MCIM
Hospitality Marketing Insight
Here’s to Your Success 🥂

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Bookings are not being won the way they were six months ago. The venues seeing growth right now are the ones aligning with how guests actually discover, choose, and spend, from TikTok driving demand, plus sound and styles designed for longer, higher-value visits.

At the same time, content without human input is losing visibility on search engines, generic offers are being ignored, and venues that feel transactional are being replaced by those that create a sense of belonging.

This strategic hospitality marketing update for June 2026 shows you exactly where to focus, so you can attract the right guests, increase spend per visit, and build repeat demand rather than relying on one-off bookings.

📄 On the Menu

• Platform Updates

• Emerging Trends

• Food & Beverage Trends

• Mood Board - Summer Beverages

• Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

• Social Media Trends & Swipe File

• AI Prompt of the Month - Boost TikTok Conversions

• What To Do

• What Not To Do

Let’s Check In ☕

📢 Platform Updates

While TikTok is dominating growth with brand follower counts up over 200% year-over-year, Meta is shrinking Sponsored” labels to Ad stickers to help paid content appear more organic. Operators must also note that while Google indexes AI content quickly, rankings often collapse within months without human authority, making high-trust platforms like Snapchat and YouTube on connected TVs essential for reaching guests during their evening relaxation.

TikTok Dominates Growth

The latest Emplifi data shows a clear difference in how platforms are performing. TikTok brand accounts are growing quickly, with follower numbers increasing by more than 200% year over year, while Facebook growth has stayed largely flat.

TikTok’s “For You” feed now drives the vast majority of views—climbing from 50% in early 2024 to over 70% by late 2025. Top-performing advertisers are spending 2 to 3× more than average, treating the platform as a core conversion engine rather than a “test-and-learn” experiment.

For hospitality, this means you should consider TikTok as a core marketing channel, invest more in high-performing content, and focus on campaigns that are built to convert, not just test.

Meta’s Stealth Transparency Move

Meta is currently shrinking its ad transparency labels, moving from the prominent “Sponsored” tag to a significantly smaller “Ad” marker.

This is a deliberate move to reduce “ad blindness.” Smaller labels allow your paid promotions to appear more like organic updates in the feed.

While this can improve click-through rates, it is attracting scrutiny from EU regulators. Ensure your creative remains high-quality; a “stealth” ad that feels like spam once clicked will only damage your brand reputation.

The AI Content Collapse

A 16-month study shows that fully AI-generated content performs well at first, then loses rankings over time as search engines prioritise content with real expertise and human input.

In a study by Search Engine Land, Google indexed 71% of AI pages within 36 days, creating an early spike in impressions. However, by the six-month mark, only 3% of those pages remained in the top 100.

AI content often lacks E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), which is the foundation of all good content.

Use AI to draft, but human insight is your only protection against long-term search invisibility. Interestingly, fresh AI posts can temporarily lift traffic to your older, human-written pages by signalling site activity to Google.

YouTube: The New Living Room Ad

YouTube is positioning itself as the affordable alternative to traditional TV advertising through its new “Creator Partnerships”. It’s a smart move too, as 83% of Gen Z viewers prefer watching their favourite creators over studio-produced shows.

You can now reach guests on their main home screen while they are relaxed and attentive. Unlike social posts that disappear in hours, 40% of YouTube video views happen more than a month after the upload date. Using Google Gemini, the platform now analyses audience similarity and organic brand mentions to suggest the best creator partners for your venue.

Have you created ads for connected TVs yet?

Snapchat’s Travel Influence

Snapchat is emerging as a high-intent tool for travel coordination, especially with Gen Z.

Research indicates that 61% of Snapchatters trust travel information found on social platforms, which is 1.6 times higher than non-users. Users actively rely on the Chat tab to organise vacations, with 71% using it to get recommendations and 64% using it to coordinate holiday travel. This leads to tangible results: 66% of Snapchatters have added a destination to their wishlist after seeing it in the app.

To succeed on Snapchat, you should use immersive AR Lenses to allow users to visualise themselves at your destination, which directly increases intent to book. Travellers share their experiences 1.6 times more on Snapchat than on other platforms, making it a powerhouse for organic peer-to-peer influence.

Because this audience values authenticity from friends and creators, relatable storytelling is far more effective than polished corporate messaging for moving a user from discovery to booking.

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