The Hostli blog
Practical writing for hotel owners and managers, plus everything that ships in the product. No jargon, no vendor hype, and no advice we would not follow ourselves.
Guides
Nearly half of one hotel’s on-site searches returned no availability
Every empty search result was a guest who wanted to buy and could not, and a share of them arrived from a paid click bought against dates the property could not sell.
Kamil Nowicki4 min readGuides
4,333 sessions and one booking, against 1,860 sessions and eighteen
Session volume is the easiest number to put in a deck and among the least informative in it, because it can be raised almost without limit by accepting cheaper inventory.
Marta Zielińska4 min readGuides
What the EU AI Act’s transparency rule actually asks of a hotel
Most summaries put the marking duty on the hotel. It sits with whoever built the generator. The exposure that actually reaches a hotel is older than the AI Act.
Ewa Lewandowska5 min readGuides
What the ad platforms claimed against what the hotel actually took
Two ad platforms claimed 92.1% of one property’s bookings between them. Neither can see the other, so both counted the same guest.
Marta Zielińska4 min readGuides
What changes when you read a hotel ad account across a year instead of a month
The default window holds under a tenth of the account, and the campaign it tells you to cut is often the one filling your low season.
Marta Zielińska4 min readGuides
5,866 hotel ad creatives, and what actually went wrong in them
At volume the failures that survive are positional, not aesthetic: type on type, a logo with nowhere quiet to sit, a mirrored currency symbol.
Ewa Lewandowska3 min readGuides
Share of bookings and share of revenue do not match, and the platform only sees one of them
The band that booked most often was not the band worth most. Optimise for booking count and the system correctly prefers the cheaper guest.
Marta Zielińska4 min readProduct updates
What's new in Hostli: August 2026
Replies to your best reviews now post without waiting on you, the WhatsApp assistant follows a conversation instead of each message alone, and campaign budgets are now held to the minimum Meta itself publishes.
Adam Ben Shmuel4 min readGuides
How much should a hotel spend on marketing?
The percentage-of-revenue rules everyone quotes were written for chains. Here is how to size a budget when you have thirty rooms.
Kamil Nowicki7 min readGuides
What OTA commission actually costs an independent hotel
The headline rate is the part you can see. Here is how to work out what distribution actually costs you per year.
Kamil Nowicki6 min readGuides
Hotel social media management that fills rooms
Most hotel social media is measured on the wrong things. What to post, how often, and what to hold it accountable for.
Kamil Nowicki7 min read
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