📌 Your Marketing Looks Fine. That’s the Problem

Are your campaigns quietly leaking revenue? Learn how strategic drift creates a hidden trust tax in hospitality.

Part of our Hospitality Marketing Strategy series

Why does marketing performance drop even though activity remains the same? What is strategic drift? And why is it so expensive in hospitality?

🌞 Hello and Welcome To Hospitality Marketing Insight

I’m your host, Dawn Gribble, and this week, we’re looking at a problem many hospitality teams recognise but struggle to name. Marketing is active. Campaigns are running. Content is going out. Yet results feel harder to achieve than they used to.

Strategic drift is what happens when marketing keeps moving, but stops matching how guests actually decide. Activity continues. Effort increases. But alignment quietly erodes. By the time results start to fall, the damage is already embedded.

📄 On the Menu

• 👀 The Hidden Risk Inside “Business as Usual”

• 📉 Strategic Drift in Hospitality Marketing

• 🧠 How Psychological Biases Compound Risks

• 🤔 How Drift Weakens Guest Trust

• 💷 The Cost of Strategic Drift

• 🚦 How to Spot Drift Early - 🗝️ VIP Exclusive

• 🧰 Practical Fixes & Frameworks - 🗝️ VIP Exclusive

• 🗺️ Strategic Action Plan - 🗝️ VIP Exclusive

Let’s Check In ☕

👉 The full breakdown is best read online. Continue Reading Here

👀 The Hidden Risk Inside “Business as Usual”

Richard Pascale once said, “Nothing fails like success,” and in hospitality marketing, that failure rarely announces itself.

Campaigns still run. Budgets are approved. Reports are reviewed. Rooms sell. Tables fill. Availability shows. From the outside, nothing looks broken.

But beneath the activity, the assumptions that once supported the strategy no longer hold. Guest discovery changes. Platforms evolve. Tactics that once converted lose their edge. Marketing keeps moving, but it is no longer aligned with how buyers actually behave.

Bookings still come in, but conversion slows. Cancellations rise. Enquiries increase. Teams work harder to achieve the same outcomes. Frontline staff spend more time answering questions than upselling. The numbers begin to confirm what many already sense, but only after momentum has been lost.

This is the risk many hospitality brands now face. Not poor marketing, but misaligned marketing. Activity driven by habit rather than intent, in a market that no longer behaves the same way. And it can cost your venue thousands.

📉 Strategic Drift in Hospitality Marketing

Strategic drift is one of the most expensive problems in hospitality marketing because it rarely looks like a mistake. It looks like work continuing as normal, while results quietly weaken. Marketing activity continues, but it reflects how the business used to operate, not how it operates now. Guest behaviour changes. Platforms evolve. Operational constraints shift. Messaging, offers, channels, and priorities remain anchored to outdated assumptions. The result is not an obvious failure, but growing friction, hesitation, and inefficiency across the guest journey.

Hospitality sits at the intersection of emotional decision-making, real-world delivery, and platform-controlled visibility. Even small misalignments compound quickly. A slight mismatch between what is marketed and what is delivered turns into guest confusion, staff pressure, review volatility, and reputational drag.

You may be investing heavily in platforms that no longer drive bookings or footfall, while newer discovery paths are under-managed, including AI search, local summaries, map results, short-form video, and reviews. At the same time, marketing continues to promote offers, packages, or experiences that operational teams struggle to deliver consistently, creating friction at the point of service.

Marketing misalignment is almost never intentional. Drift develops gradually, through sensible decisions made under pressure. Here’s why it happens:

🚨 Pressure Replaces Commercial Objectives

Hospitality teams operate under constant pressure. Staffing gaps, unpredictable demand, weather shifts, rising costs, and platform changes all demand attention at once. In that environment, marketing decisions are rarely made in calm planning cycles. They are made in response to what feels urgent. Over time, the day-to-day focus shifts from commercial intent to short-term pressure.

For example, a hotel with a commercial objective of protecting rate integrity reacts to a midweek occupancy dip by triggering a last-minute “20% off this weekend” campaign. It fills some rooms, but resets price expectations and angers guests who booked at full rate days earlier.

Meanwhile, at a local restaurant with an ambition to build a strong reputation for quality, a quiet month leads to menu changes to “make things easier.” Dishes are removed or simplified, but the menu descriptions and listings are not updated. Guests arrive expecting items that are no longer available, and they’re not happy about it.

These decisions are made to relieve immediate pressure, not to build momentum. Messages shift week to week, and offers are pushed to fill gaps. But when everything is constantly changing, it becomes difficult to measure what is actually working. There is no stable baseline, no clear before and after. Proper testing becomes almost impossible, not just A/B tests on calls to action or design, but any meaningful attempt to understand cause and effect at all.

Marketing stops creating demand and starts chasing it.

⚙️ Tactics Start Leading Strategy

Strategic drift accelerates when teams keep executing tactics long after they’ve stopped asking why. For example, a consultant once advised that using thirty hashtags on Instagram would improve reach, so teams continue to do it, unaware that the platform has since shifted to AI-led content distribution, where discovery is driven by behaviour, relevance, and predicted interest rather than manual tagging. The tactic remains, but the logic behind it no longer holds. Yet the team still spends considerable time on hashtag research.

Rigid content calendars may demand daily output, creating pressure to publish something rather than respond to what guests need to know or what the business can reliably deliver at that moment. Daypart, cognitive load, and reader intent are rarely considered.

Another common pattern is reporting dictating activity. Channels are maintained because they appear on a report, not because they influence booking decisions. Teams keep producing content or running activity simply to ‘have something to show’ at review time, even when those channels no longer play a meaningful role in guest decision-making.

Over time, marketing becomes shaped by inherited rules rather than deliberate choices. This is how tactical execution quietly replaces strategic intent, and how strategic drift takes hold.

🏃 Momentum becomes a Proxy for Success

As strategic drift sets in, momentum is increasingly mistaken for performance. Engagement, impressions, and traffic become stand-ins for progress because they are visible, familiar, and easy to report, even when they no longer correlate with commercial outcomes. But high traffic with low dwell time signals weak or misdirected intent. Likes and comments reflect momentary interest, not booking confidence or decision readiness. Reach can increase even as consideration quietly falls, masking early signs of decline. The numbers increase, but sales do not necessarily follow.

Teams invest effort where activity feels obvious and validating, rather than where it reduces friction or supports decisions. Time goes into superficial commenting, while slower, less visible work like managing a Facebook group or responding properly to reviews is deprioritised. Momentum without direction is risk accumulation, disguised as progress. Outdated FAQs stay live. Menu descriptions and policies are not reviewed. Review replies become generic or delayed, even though these are often the final checkpoints before commitment.

Small inconsistencies across platforms are left unresolved because they do not surface in dashboards. These gaps do not reduce activity, but systematically increase hesitation. Guests work harder to decide, and teams work harder to compensate.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic”
Peter Drucker

🧠 How Psychological Biases Compound Risks

Strategic drift is rarely sustained by bad decisions. It is sustained by very human ones.

Most marketing teams understand, in theory, that conditions have changed. What keeps drift in place is not ignorance, but predictable behavioural patterns that feel sensible under pressure.

In hospitality marketing, a small number of well-documented psychological biases tend to reinforce drift once it has started. These biases do not cause failure on their own. They make it harder to stop, reassess, and change course.

The most common are:

• Sunk cost bias, which makes past investment feel like a reason to continue

• Status quo bias, which favours familiar processes over necessary change

• Confirmation bias, which rewards signals that support existing activity

• Loss aversion, which makes stopping feel riskier than persisting

The strongest driver is sunk cost. When time, money, or personal credibility have been invested in a channel or approach, reassessment feels risky. Letting go feels like admitting waste. Continuing feels safer than confronting uncertainty.

Teams persist with channels that once drove bookings but now generate low-intent traffic. Campaign structures remain in place because people are trained around them. Legacy spend is defended because “we’ve always done it this way.”

Familiarity compounds the problem. Established processes reduce cognitive load in already stretched teams. Changing course introduces explanation, retraining, and short-term disruption at exactly the moment pressure is highest. So activity continues, not because it is needed, but because it is known.

There is also a tendency to protect existing reach, rankings, or engagement out of fear that stopping will make performance look worse. In practice, this often locks brands into defending yesterday’s visibility rather than creating demand that reflects current reality.

Left unchecked, these biases quietly reward effort, familiarity, and perceived safety inside busy organisations.

🙏 Hospitality Marketing Insight, brought to you by Dawn Gribble, and made possible through the kind support of our VIP subscribers and sponsors.

🗝 Upgrade to a VIP subscription to unlock 90+ exclusive playbooks and frameworks, in-depth reports and expert trend analysis created for hotels, restaurants, and hospitality brands. Thank You for Supporting my Work

🤔 How Drift Weakens Guest Trust

In hospitality, trust is not a brand asset. It is a precondition for purchase. This matters more than in most categories because purchases are anticipatory. Guests are not just booking a room or a table. They are imagining how it will feel. Comfort. Ease. Pleasure. Being looked after.

When those expectations are shaped by marketing that no longer reflects reality, decision certainty starts to weaken before a booking is even made.

From the guest’s perspective, drift creates friction. It shows up as hesitation. A pause. A sense that something needs checking. “This isn’t quite what I expected.” “That’s not how it was described.” “I just want to double-check before I book.” The decision still happens, but it takes longer and carries less certainty.

That hesitation is usually triggered by small inconsistencies. A package that does not align with availability. Messaging that promises a feeling the experience no longer delivers. Different platforms present slightly different versions of the same offer.

None of these issues is damaging in isolation. Together, they introduce doubt. Guests compensate by checking reviews, comparing platforms, or seeking reassurance elsewhere. That extra effort is a trust tax.

As discovery becomes more fragmented, including AI-driven search and summaries, those discrepancies no longer stay small. What would once have been a minor mismatch becomes searchable, comparable, and repeatable. Guests start to assess risk earlier in the decision process. If the details do not line up, they quietly question what else might not. Whether the experience will run smoothly. Whether they are taking a chance on the experience.

When strategy drifts, frontline teams feel it first. Staff are left explaining offers they did not design, managing expectations shaped elsewhere, and de-escalating disappointment that could have been avoided. Service becomes more about correction than delivery. This adds pressure, slows operations, and chips away at the experience guests were promised in the first place. Trust is damaged.

By the time the impact shows up in revenue, conversion rates, or repeat visits, the damage is already embedded. Strategic drift rarely breaks trust outright. It dilutes it. And diluted trust does not generate complaints or clear feedback. It simply redirects demand towards your competitors.

That is why trust erosion is one of the most dangerous consequences of strategic drift in hospitality marketing.

💷 The Cost of Strategic Drift

Strategic drift becomes dangerous because its cost stays invisible. To most businesses, nothing appears broken. But when you put numbers against the friction it creates, the commercial impact becomes unavoidable. Here is what that cost typically looks like in practice.

📞 The Clarification Cost

One of the earliest signals of drift is a rise in “just checking” enquiries. Guests are no longer asking how to book. They are asking whether what they’ve seen can be trusted.

Take a typical hospitality operation:

• 80 enquiries per week

• 30% of those are clarification questions

• Each takes around 15 minutes to resolve

• Frontline staff cost £25 per hour

That’s 24 clarification enquiries a week.
24 × 15 minutes = 6 hours of staff time.
6 hours × £25 = £150 per week, or £600 per month.

That money is being spent reconciling conflicting information, not converting demand or delivering service.

🤔 The Misalignment Tax

Drift also shows up in paid media. Ads continue to run, clicks still arrive, but conversion stagnates because the promise no longer matches reality.

For example:

• £3,000 per month spent on legacy campaigns

• Historic conversion rate: 2.0%

• Current conversion rate: 1.5%

That’s a 25% drop in efficiency.

£3,000 × 25% = £750 per month effectively wasted, not because the channel failed, but because it is now amplifying misalignment.

🚪The Silent Revenue Leak

The most expensive cost is the one no report shows.

Guests move between Google, social media, your website, and third-party platforms, trying to reconcile details. A percentage will simply give up and quietly choose a competitor with a cohesive offer.

Consider:

• 10,000 monthly website visitors

• 5% are returning visitors who never book (500 guests)

• 10% of those walk away due to confusion

• Average booking value: £300

That’s 50 lost bookings.
50 × £300 = £15,000 per month in redirected demand.

No complaints. No abandoned basket. Just gone.

This is why strategic drift is so hard to address. The damage is spread thinly across teams, platforms, and decisions. It never arrives as one dramatic problem. It just makes everything harder and more expensive than it should be.

🚦 How to Spot Drift Early

Strategic drift shows up first in decision friction, not in performance metrics. By the time dashboards move, misalignment is already established.

Most teams watch:

• conversion rate decline

• rising bounce rate

• falling average order value

• increased abandoned bookings

• reduced repeat visits or email engagement

• review sentiment flattening rather than sharply dropping

These indicators confirm damage. They do not prevent it.

📡 What You Need to Monitor

Early strategic drift is evident in how guests attempt to make a decision, rather than in a sudden drop in demand. These signals appear before bookings fall and before margins shrink. At this stage, brand perception shows up less as sentiment and more as confidence in whether the brand’s promise will hold up under scrutiny.

Increased platform hopping
When guests begin moving repeatedly between Google, social profiles, review platforms, and your website before booking, discovery activity increases, but conversions decline. Guests are cross-checking information rather than progressing towards purchase.

To identify drift, look for