Hotel Marketing Services, Minus the Agency
Every hotel marketing agency you're comparing right now sells the same thing: a monthly retainer, a named account manager, and a briefing cycle measured in days. Hostli replaces that whole loop. The platform builds your campaigns from your own booking data and reviews, and you approve the result from your phone in minutes, not after a call and a draft round.
Book a demoIndependent hotels pay 15% to 25% in commission to OTAs on every booking that comes through them. That is the actual budget for hotel marketing already leaving the property each month, just paid to a distribution channel instead of a growth channel. Hostli is $100 a month flat on Deluxe, and on the managed plans 2% to 2.2%, only on the direct bookings it can show you, one by one. Every direct booking a campaign wins back replaces that commission outright.
Hostli vs. a marketing agency
If you already work with an agency, this is the honest comparison, not a sales pitch against them.
| Criteria | Hostli | Marketing agency |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Relative cost: 1 out of 4Deluxe is $100 a month, flat, with no success fee. Superior and Signature add a person accountable for your bookings, at 2.2% or 2% on the direct bookings we can show you, one by one. | Relative cost: 4 out of 4A retainer. You are paying for people and their hours, which is why it costs several times more. |
| What happens when you spend more on ads | Relative cost: 1 out of 4Your platform fee disappears. We only grow when your bookings do, not when your ad spend does. | Relative cost: 4 out of 4The fee usually grows with it. Percentage-of-spend pricing is standard in the industry, so the incentive is to increase your budget, not your bookings. |
| Turnaround on a new campaign | Minutes. Generated from your own booking data and reviews. | Days to weeks. Briefing call, draft round, revisions. |
| Approving creative | Your own app. You see the ad, approve or reject it from your phone, and it goes live. Full independence, with our marketing team on hand whenever you want a second opinion. | Through an account manager. Email threads and a wait for the next revision. |
| Knowing who your guests are | Built automatically from your actual booking data. Who really stays with you, when, and at what rate. | Manual audience research and experience-based judgement, rebuilt by hand for each campaign. |
| Reporting | A live dashboard. Campaign performance updates as it happens, with our marketing team guiding you on what to do about it. | A weekly meeting. You find out what happened after it already happened. |
| Organic social media | Relative cost: 1 out of 4Included in the same subscription. Nothing extra to buy. | Relative cost: 3 out of 4Typically a separate line item, sold on top of the advertising retainer. |
| How much gets published | Stories and posts daily, drawn from your own photos and what is actually happening at the property. | Commonly capped at roughly 15 posts a month, because every one costs someone an hour. |
| Competitor tracking | Continuous. We track competing hotels’ live rates, running promotions and how they position themselves, and feed that straight into your campaigns. | Rarely offered at all. When it is, it is a one-off report that is stale the week after it lands. |
| SEO and GEO | Relative cost: 1 out of 4Included. SEO is being found on Google when someone searches for a hotel like yours. GEO is the newer version of the same problem: being the hotel that ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers actually name when a guest asks them where to stay. | Relative cost: 3 out of 4Charged as a separate engagement, and GEO is usually not on the menu yet. |
| Working alongside your current agency | Runs beside them, with limited access to your Meta account. It does not touch their campaigns. | N/A |
What happens in the first week
No onboarding project, no kickoff deck. Just the steps that get a live, approved campaign running.
- 1
Day 1: connect
Connect Meta Business Manager and your PMS or booking engine. Hostli reads booking history and review data immediately.
- 2
Day 1-2: guest groups and ads are built
Hostli groups your guests by what they have in common and builds a campaign for each group: images, wording, and who should see it. All of it ready for you to review.
- 3
Day 2-3: you approve from your phone
Review, edit, or reject each campaign on mobile. Nothing publishes without your approval.
- 4
Day 3-5: first campaigns go live
Approved campaigns go live on Facebook and Instagram, with daily spending limits already in place so no single ad can run away with the budget.
- 5
End of week 1: first read on performance
The first numbers come back and start to show which guests are booking direct. The budget shifts toward them.
Yarden Estate
60%+ more back on every ad dollar¹, alongside their existing agency
Yarden Estate ran Hostli alongside the marketing agency they already had. Hostli reached valuable guests the agency was not advertising to, without getting in the agency's way. Outcomes vary by hotel. Performance figures are taken from third-party reporting in Meta Ads Manager and Google Analytics, not from Hostli's own measurement.
- Back on every ad dollar¹
- 10×+
- New guest groups reached
- 4×
- From signup to live campaign
- <30m
* Yarden Estate is a Hostli design partner. Results reflect a single deployment and are not typical or guaranteed for other hotels.
Designed for the modern hotelier
Run your entire digital footprint from your phone. We work with a small group of boutique hotels. Apply for access and we'll be in touch personally.