📌 Profit Protection: When Marketing Creates Hidden Risk

A Profit Protection briefing on where marketing activity quietly exposes hospitality businesses to avoidable loss.

Part of our Hospitality Marketing Profit Protection Series

Our numbers look strong, so why aren’t the results following? We’ve been banned from our social media accounts. We’re thousands out of pocket. What do we do now?

🌞 Hello and Welcome To Hospitality Marketing Insight

I’m your host, Dawn Gribble, and I want to share situations I’ve uncovered that have already cost businesses thousands.

Over the course of my 25-year career, I’ve repeatedly been brought in after marketing activity had already caused damage. Not through bad intent, but through decisions made without a working understanding of risk, applicable standards, or who ultimately carries accountability.

In this edition, we explore the kinds of marketing errors that not only cost businesses money but often continue unchecked until the impact becomes unavoidable. You don’t want to leave it that late.

📄 On the Menu

• Errors That Lose Money Before Anyone Realises

• Risks You Inherit Without Realising

• When the Numbers Themselves Are the Problem

Let’s Check In ☕

📉 Errors That Lose Money Before Anyone Realises

Some marketing failures show up quickly. Not as obvious poor performance, but as money being spent and enquiries coming in that don’t match the business. These are often the problems businesses notice first, because the financial impact is immediate.

📞 Strong Demand From the Wrong Audience

A legacy foodservice brand knew they had to ‘do marketing,’ but they didn’t know where to start. They engaged a freelancer to manage paid advertising. The campaigns generated a high volume of enquiries, which initially appeared encouraging. However, it soon became clear that the majority of calls were for products the business did not sell.

After the first month, there were no new trade customers.

The targeting had been set by someone who misunderstood what the company did and who it served. Targeting B2C customers rather than B2B. This was driven by ignorance and inexperience, compounded by overconfidence, which the GM had mistaken for expertise. During the fallout, it emerged that the freelancer had falsified their Google certification status.

Several thousand pounds were spent without producing a single genuine enquiry for the products actually available. Beyond the wasted spend, the business experienced anger, loss of confidence in marketing, and further disruption when the freelancer disengaged and ghosted the client after a complaint was raised.

While the issue was identified relatively quickly and the campaign was paused, the spend was unrecoverable. To add insult to injury, the data collected was unusable due to the audience being fundamentally wrong.

Some mistakes cost money immediately. Others remove your ability to trade altogether.

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🖥️ A Routine Update That Erased a Website

An independent holiday apartment business began questioning the monthly maintenance fee they were paying their website developer. The work was largely invisible, and they struggled to see what they were actually paying for.

After finding a lower-cost freelancer, they hired her to carry out routine updates on the website. Rather than taking backups, testing changes, or staging updates incrementally, she ran a blanket update across all plugins at once.

The website had accumulated years of legacy coding and customisations. Updating everything at once triggered conflicts that crashed the live site entirely. No backup had been taken beforehand, making it impossible to restore.

As a result, the business lost its entire website and was forced to wait approximately six weeks for a rebuild. Without a functioning site, this caused a complete loss of enquiries, direct loss of income, and significant stress for a small operator. There was no quick fix.

With no backup available, recovery meant starting again from scratch, rebuilding content, reinstating booking functionality, and restoring visibility. The damage was costly and entirely avoidable.

Not all marketing risk comes from technical mistakes. Sometimes it comes from prioritising reach over relevance.

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🚫 When Reaching Everyone Damages the Domain

A small chain of family hotels and serviced apartments was struggling to fill rooms in a key location as competition in the region increased.

To address this, responsibility for email campaigns was handed to a member of the sales team. Assuming that reaching as many people as possible would drive results, a discount-led email for the serviced apartments was sent to the entire company database in one send.

Almost immediately, delivery error notifications began flooding the main inbox. That was followed later the same day by a message from the email provider confirming the account had been suspended for spamming.

Complaints and unsubscribes followed, forcing the business into a reactive apology process. As the delivery errors continued, other team members discovered their emails were also being rejected, not just the address used to send the campaign.

The person responsible did not understand the mechanics of email marketing. The database had never been cleaned and contained years of addresses, including ex-employees, newsletter unsubscribers, complainants, suppliers, competitors, media contacts, and existing customers. Nothing had been segmented, and the serviced-apartment discounts were sent to family audiences for whom they were irrelevant.

The impact went beyond a single campaign. Spam complaints and hard bounces damaged the sending domain itself, meaning future emails were treated with suspicion or blocked altogether. Internal communication was disrupted, and legitimate messages struggled to reach inboxes long after the campaign was stopped.

Beyond the technical damage, brand perception suffered. Recovery required time-consuming work to rebuild trust with email providers, restore internal communication, and repair customer confidence.

Sometimes the damage doesn’t come from what you send. It comes from what you didn’t realise you were responsible for.

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If these examples feel familiar, the VIP edition goes deeper into how these failures happen and how to prevent them.

⚠️ Risks You Inherit Without Realising

Some marketing activity creates risk long after the work is done. When that happens, responsibility lies with the operator, not the individual who made the mistake.

📸 When a Picturesque Location Turned Into a Four-Figure Invoice

A well-established five-star resort on the outskirts of a popular and picturesque UK city hired a local social media manager to take care of their channels. The location itself was a major part of the venue’s appeal, regularly referenced by guests and central to how the business positioned itself.

She was enthusiastic and posted frequently, sharing images of the venue across their channels. When asked to promote the surrounding area more heavily, she said she intended to use “royalty-free” images sourced via Google Image Search.

The venue later discovered that several of the images used to promote the city had come from premium international stock libraries and were being used without the appropriate licence or attribution.

Unfortunately, the social media manager appeared to have a knowledge gap around image licensing and commercial usage. Whether this came from ignorance or overconfidence was unclear, but the rights had not been checked or purchased.

The resort was required to pay a four-figure sum to resolve the copyright breach. For a couple-owned business with decades of experience in hospitality, it was an unplanned and stressful financial hit.

Once identified, the issue was resolved quickly, but the full fee had to be paid. There was no scope for negotiation, and the cost was unrecoverable.

Not all hospitality marketing risk comes from content. Some comes from shortcuts taken in setup.

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⛔ When Access Shortcuts Wiped Out Years of Trust

A well-known local restaurant had built its reputation carefully over many years. The owners were active in their community, regularly engaging in local Facebook groups, responding promptly to messages, and replying to reviews as they came in. Their Facebook page and Instagram account weren’t just marketing channels. They were how customers asked questions, made decisions, and felt connected to the business.

To manage paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram, the restaurant engaged a freelancer. Rather than setting up proper business access through Meta’s business tools, the freelancer logged in using the owner’s personal Facebook credentials. Without the owner’s knowledge, she also outsourced elements of the work to a small remote team.

From the platform’s perspective, login activity began appearing from multiple countries within short periods of time. Security systems were triggered. The Facebook advertising account was locked, followed by the company page. The linked Instagram account was disabled shortly afterwards. Because personal credentials had been used, the owner also lost access to his own personal Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Advertising stopped immediately. More damaging still, the restaurant disappeared from the channels the local community relied on to get in touch. Messages went unanswered. Reviews could not be responded to. Customers assumed the business was ignoring them or had closed. Complaints began circulating in local groups, not because of poor service, but because the business had lost the ability to reply.

Recovery attempts failed. The freelancer did not have the information required to verify ownership, and the owner was unable to regain access to accounts that were flagged as compromised. In the end, both the business and personal accounts were permanently lost.

Years of photos, conversations, reviews, and community trust disappeared overnight. The restaurant was forced to start again from scratch, rebuilding its presence and repairing local confidence, despite having done nothing wrong.

Some mistakes lock you out. Others put you on record.

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📢 When “We’ve Always Done It This Way” Became a Compliance Record

A leading global hotel chain ran Facebook advertising using “from” price claims to promote room rates. The prices were technically accurate, but only available on very limited dates and not representative of what most guests would actually find when they tried to book.

Internally, nothing about the wording raised alarms. It was the language the business had used for years, across multiple campaigns, without issue. From their perspective, this was standard practice, not a risk.

The problem wasn’t bad intent. It was an assumption. The pricing was used as a marketing hook without fully considering how it would be interpreted by guests or how it would be assessed outside the business. What felt normal internally did not meet advertising standards around price transparency and availability.

The ads were reviewed by the Advertising Standards Authority as part of a wider look at room-rate advertising in the sector. The hotel responded, but the complaint was upheld. The advertising was ruled misleading and ordered to be removed, with instructions that it must not be used again in that form.

There was no fine. But the ruling was published publicly on the ASA website and circulated through subscriber updates. It became a permanent compliance record, attached to the brand and visible long after the campaign itself had ended.

The impact wasn’t the immediate loss of revenue. It was exposure. Increased scrutiny followed. Internal pricing guidance had to be reviewed and redistributed. Language that had once felt routine was now treated as a regulatory risk.

And this wasn’t an isolated case. Similar rulings have been upheld across the hospitality sector, often involving well-established brands using familiar wording that no longer meets regulatory expectations.

Not all damage comes from platforms or regulators. Some of it starts with information that feels reassuring, but isn’t true.

❌ When the Numbers Themselves Are the Problem

Some of the most damaging marketing failures don’t involve platforms or regulators at all. They happen when leadership is given information that feels reassuring, but doesn’t reflect reality.

📑 Reports That Looked Right and Were Entirely False

A regional restaurant chain relied on monthly performance reports produced by its in-house marketing team and marketing manager. Each month, the numbers pointed in the same direction. Engagement was up. Traffic was improving. Campaigns appeared to be performing better than the month before.

On paper, marketing looked healthy. As a result, leadership felt reassured. Attention shifted elsewhere. Less time was spent looking directly at the channels, because the reports suggested there was nothing to worry about.

Operationally, things felt harder. Teams were fielding more questions. Conversions were not improving at the same pace as the reported growth. But the monthly reports continued to present a positive picture, and over time, they became the primary reference point for decision-making.

Concerns were raised by a holding company partner, who felt the reported performance did not align with reality elsewhere in the business. I was asked to review the marketing activity independently.

What emerged was not a reporting error. The reports had been deliberately manipulated. Figures were adjusted upwards to appear positive. Underperforming activity was reframed. Unfavourable results were quietly excluded. This continued month after month.

The team, largely made up of young and inexperienced marketers, were working in an environment where poor performance felt unsafe to admit. Rather than surface problems and correct them, they changed the numbers to protect themselves.

Trust collapsed quickly once this came to light. The team was dismissed, leaving the business with the additional challenge of rebuilding marketing capability, confidence, and oversight from scratch.

Months of learning had been lost. The budget had been spent based on false information. Decisions had been made on numbers that never reflected reality.

And sometimes, what looks like growth is the problem.

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🤖 Traffic That Looked Like Growth and Caused Lasting Damage

A hotel appointed a remote agency after posting its requirements on a freelancer project platform. The brief was straightforward. Increase direct bookings by driving more traffic and improving conversion. The contract was awarded on the lowest quote.

Shortly after work began, website traffic increased sharply. The General Manager was initially pleased, particularly given the hotel’s location in a popular tourist destination that struggled during the off-peak season. On the surface, it looked like progress against the brief.

But bookings and inbound enquiries did not improve. Visitors were arriving on the site and leaving almost immediately. Volume increased, but conversion did not follow. Over time, site performance declined, and search engine ranks began to drop.

The traffic was not genuine. It was bot traffic, generated artificially rather than by real prospective guests. Instead of reflecting interest, automated visits were hitting pages, triggering bounces, and distorting engagement signals that search engines use to assess quality and relevance.

Rather than signalling popularity, this activity polluted user signals and damaged how search engines and recommendation systems evaluated the site. What looked like momentum externally was interpreted as low-quality engagement internally by automated systems.

Even after the activity stopped, the impact didn’t reverse. Visibility continued to fall. Recovery took many months, requiring sustained periods of clean traffic before trust began to rebuild.

What initially appeared to be growth resulted in reduced visibility, lost booking opportunities, and extended commercial damage that far outlasted the original campaign.

Once activity is mistaken for progress, decision-making starts to drift.

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👀 Attention Mistaken for Performance

Across the hospitality industry, the most common failure I see isn’t a broken campaign or a poor channel choice. It’s businesses assuming they’re performing well because the numbers they’re shown look active.

Views increase. Impressions rise. Follower counts grow. Traffic moves upward. On paper, it appears that something is working, and there is always something new to report.

But none of it translates into bookings, covers, repeat visits, or profitable demand.

Because these numbers are easy to generate and easy to present, they begin to influence decisions. Budget follows activity. Time is allocated to channels that produce attention rather than outcomes. Activity is rewarded, even when it delivers no commercial return.

Over time, the gap becomes harder to ignore. Marketing appears productive, but revenue does not respond. Teams remain occupied. Reports stay positive. The underlying issue remains unchallenged.

Attention is finite. What is created, promoted, and prioritised online matters. When effort is directed toward visibility without value, businesses gradually drift away from the activity that actually sustains them.

By the time leadership recognises the difference between attention and performance, budget has already been spent, habits are established, and correcting course becomes harder than it should have been.

This is rarely the result of a single decision. It is a pattern. And it is one of the hardest problems to identify from the inside.

In each of these cases, marketing work was carried out without a clear understanding of the rules, the consequences, or who would ultimately carry responsibility. In every case, the cost fell back to the operator, financially, operationally, or reputationally.

None of these issues was inevitable. They came from weak oversight, misplaced trust, and a lack of practical safeguards around how marketing work was executed, reported, and approved.

Seeing these patterns clearly is the first step. Preventing them requires deliberate intervention.

🛡️ Coming Soon: The Platform Protection Playbook

Good marketing creates demand.
Poorly governed marketing creates risk.

The Platform Protection Playbook is written for hospitality operators who want to understand where marketing activity exposes the business, and how to prevent avoidable mistakes before they become costly.

Clear, practical, and grounded in real operational experience. Delivered on Thursday

🗝 VIP Exclusive

VIP access also includes more than 90 in-depth playbooks and frameworks, specialist AI marketing reports, and expert analysis created specifically for hotels, restaurants, and hospitality brands.

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 🥂

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