How to Choose a PR agency for Hotels

By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026

A traveller in 1960 chose a hotel from a guidebook printed the year before. Your guest chooses from reviews written last weekend, by strangers, ranked by an algorithm you do not control. This guide reviewed the industry's performance data, the research on how guests actually book, and the ownership structures that complicate every hotel story, and landed on one governing fact: for a hotel, reputation is not a communications output. It is a revenue input, priced nightly. The agency you hire is therefore a revenue hire, and you should interrogate it like one, on its command of reviews, channels and the owner brand triangle, not on the gloss of its launch parties.

I Discrimen: Your most important media channel is the one you cannot pitch

Begin with the distinction that reorganises everything. Hotels live inside two media systems at once. The first is the familiar one: travel editors, lifestyle coverage, opening stories. The second is larger and more decisive: the review and search ecosystem where the booking is actually made.

Tripadvisor's research with Ipsos MORI found that 81 percent of travellers always or frequently read reviews before booking a place to stay, that 79 percent are more likely to book the hotel with the higher rating when properties are otherwise identical, and that 52 percent would never book a hotel with no reviews at all (Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI, 2019). Guests read an average of nine reviews before deciding. Your star rating is a media placement that never comes down, republished at the exact moment of purchase.

An agency that treats reputation management as a clerical add-on, a junior replying to reviews between pitches, misunderstands the business it serves. The right agency treats the review profile as the front page of the hotel: monitored daily, answered with discipline, mined for the operational truths that should change both the service and the story.

Coverage impresses owners. Reviews pay the mortgage. Hire for the channel that prices your rooms.

II Machina: Three principals, one story, and a rate machine underneath

Hotel communications serve three principals whose interests overlap but never coincide. The owner carries the asset and the debt. The brand, where one exists, carries standards and a system to protect. The management company carries the operating reality. A story that delights one can alarm another, and an agency that does not ask who owns, who brands and who operates before it drafts a word is not ready to draft.

The triangle also explains why hotel communications fail in a distinctive way: delay. A statement that needs an owner's lawyer, a brand's standards team and a management company's insurer to agree will arrive after the story has set. Competent hotel agencies pre negotiate the triangle in peacetime, template approvals, dollar free language for incidents, named approvers with deputies, so that in a crisis the machine runs at news speed. Ask a candidate firm directly who approves their crisis statements for their current hotel clients and how long approval takes at midnight. A firm that has solved the triangle will answer in names and minutes. A firm that has not will answer with the word process, and you will have learned the most important thing in the meeting.

Underneath the triangle sits the rate machine. The American Hotel and Lodging Association projected average occupancy of 63.6 percent and RevPAR of 101.82 dollars for 2024, still chasing the 65.8 percent occupancy of 2019 (AHLA, 2024). In a market recovering unevenly, where group and business travel return at different speeds by city, communications is one of the few levers that can shift mix toward higher rated segments: groups, meetings, celebrations, longer leisure stays.

So the agency question is commercial. Can this firm tell stories that meeting planners forward to their committees? Can it make a renovated ballroom or a chef appointment into group business, not just a lifestyle item? Ask candidates to show you coverage that a sales team used. The answer separates hotel agencies from travel publicity shops with hotel clients.

III Exemplum: The labour story shows what integrated PR earns

Take the industry's defining recent problem as the worked example. AHLA projected hotels would employ nearly 45,000 more people in 2024 yet remain about 225,000 employees short of 2019 levels, while paying a record 123 billion dollars in wages (AHLA, 2024). Every general manager lived that gap as cancelled amenities, closed floors and review scores complaining about service the staffing could not deliver.

Hotels that communicated well through the shortage did three things. They told the workforce story publicly, pay, training, career ladders, making the hotel an employer the town wanted to staff. They set guest expectations honestly in their own channels before review platforms set them angrily. And they made service recovery a communications discipline, empowering and scripting the front desk response that becomes tomorrow's review text.

Hotels that communicated badly pretended the shortage was invisible to guests. The reviews corrected them, at length, in public, attached to the property's name in search results for years.

Your agency must be able to run all three plays: employer branding, expectation setting and review response as one system. Ask for their labour communications work by name. In this cycle it is the most honest portfolio piece a hotel agency can show.

IV Damnum: The price of a publicity firm doing a revenue job

The failure modes are expensive and specific. A safety incident handled slowly becomes the property's defining search result. A tone deaf campaign during a local crisis, a flood, a strike, a tragedy in your city, converts a hotel from neighbour to opportunist in one news cycle. An opening that generates national lifestyle applause and no group enquiries burns the owner's launch budget on the audience least able to fill a Tuesday in February.

There is a slower bleed as well. Every month the review profile drifts unattended, the rating slips a tenth, and the pricing power slips with it; the same Tripadvisor research found travellers will pay more for higher rated properties, which means the unmanaged tenth is a rate cut you granted yourself (Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI, 2019). OTA dependence deepens meanwhile, because a weak direct story leaves the algorithms as your only demand source, at commission rates that compound the loss.

Total the bleed honestly and the specialist agency's retainer is not the expensive option. It is the deductible on losses you are already paying monthly without an invoice to show for them.

V Genus: Agency shapes, read against hotel economics

Grade the finalists on evidence, weighted toward the channels that price rooms.

VI Regio: A hotel's market is a city, and cities differ in kind

National hotel narratives are mostly fiction. A downtown convention property, an airport hotel and a resort ninety minutes away may share a brand and nothing else: different demand drivers, different local politics, different media. The agency must work at city level, in the market's own logic.

Probe that level concretely. Which local business journal and newspaper reporters cover hospitality in your city, and when did the team last brief them? What is the state of the convention calendar, the stadium schedule, the university parents weekends that actually set your compression nights? How does the team handle the civic layer, the lodging tax debates, the short term rental politics, the development fights, where a hotel's licence to be liked is decided?

A firm that answers in national titles and campaign ideas is selling you a poster. A firm that answers in your city's calendar, politics and feeder markets is selling you occupancy.

Segmentation sharpens the same point. A single property can host a wedding market that books a year out on emotion and imagery, a corporate market that books on Tuesday for Thursday on rate and reliability, and a drive market that books on weather and whim. Each segment reads different media, trusts different proof and forgives different failures. Weddings forgive a dated lobby if the ballroom photographs beautifully; corporate travel managers forgive almost nothing about invoicing, safety documentation or response times. An agency that proposes one story for all three segments has not done the reading. Ask for the segment map, one line per segment with its channel and its proof, and grade the agency on whether the map resembles your actual mix rather than a template from another property in another kind of town.

VII Occasio: The opening is the direct relationship the platforms cannot tax

The strategic opening for hotels is real and it is this: the guest relationship is being repriced. Properties that build a direct story, a reason to book with the house, a name and a face and a local life worth following, reduce their dependence on commissioned intermediaries and raise the value of every review that points home. Communications is the cheapest direct booking channel a hotel owns, and most hotels fund it like an afterthought while paying commissions like a tax.

AHLA's figures underline the stakes: nominal guest spending was projected at 758.6 billion dollars in 2024, up almost 24 percent on 2019 (AHLA, 2024). Demand exists. The contest is over who captures it and at what margin. An agency that builds your direct narrative, your chef, your neighbourhood authority, your meeting story, your review engine, is doing margin work disguised as storytelling.

Notice, too, the equaliser available to independents and soft brand properties. The review ecosystem does not care about your flag. A well run independent with a disciplined reputation system outranks a famous brand's neglected property in the only list the guest actually reads. The agency that understands this gives smaller hotels a weapon the brand fee never bought.

The public relations services outline shows how review systems, group storytelling and crisis cover are packaged, and the industries team page sets out who would hold your incident rota. The resources library carries the companion guides for luxury resorts and boutique hotels, whose reputation mechanics differ from yours in instructive ways.

VIII Consilium: A selection method with the owner in the room

Constitute the decision properly. The owner or asset manager, the general manager and the director of sales should all sit in the final meeting, because each will judge the agency by a different output and all three outputs matter. Brief them on the triangle before the agencies present, so the presentations are tested against it.

Set two exercises. First, hand over your last ten negative reviews and ask the team to draft responses live, then to name the operational changes the reviews are demanding. You will learn their tone, their speed and whether they read reviews as intelligence or as insults. Second, describe an incident, a guest injury with a phone video already posted, and take the first hour plan step by step.

Contract for the system, not the campaign. Named deliverables should include the review management protocol with response standards, the group and meetings story calendar, the crisis rota with out of hours commitments, and quarterly reporting to ownership that connects activity to rating, mix and direct channel movement. Review at six months against those deliverables, and let the campaign applause look after itself.

IX Quaesita: Questions hotel owners and managers ask

How much does a hotel PR agency cost?

Specialist hospitality retainers for a single property commonly begin in the mid four figures monthly and scale with review management scope and market size, while openings and major incidents are usually project priced. Portfolio deals across several properties change the arithmetic and should be negotiated against the deliverables grid in this guide, not against a rate card.

Should the agency respond to our reviews, or should the hotel?

The hotel's voice must stay the hotel's, but the system, monitoring, drafting discipline, escalation rules and monthly analysis, is exactly what a good agency installs and runs. Guests can tell when responses are templated by a distant vendor. The right model is agency built process, property voiced replies, jointly reviewed weekly.

Can PR actually move group and meetings business?

Yes, when it is aimed correctly. Meeting planners research venues the way guests research rooms, and credible trade coverage, planner facing storytelling and a visible, well reviewed property make the sales team's shortlist conversations shorter. Demand that the agency show you planner facing outputs, not consumer clippings, as the evidence.

What should happen in the first hour of a safety incident?

One accountable spokesperson identified, facts gathered against a checklist, a holding statement that expresses care and commits to updates without speculating on cause, and ownership and brand notified through the agreed chain. Your agency contract should name who does each of these at 3 a.m., because incidents do not respect office hours.

How do we handle a story involving our brand or franchisor?

Through the triangle protocol agreed before the story breaks: who speaks for the property, what the brand approves, and how quickly. Agencies experienced with flagged properties hold these agreements as standing documents. If a candidate has never worked inside brand approval systems, your property will pay for its education.

Is influencer hosting worth it for a hotel?

Sometimes, for the right property story and the right audience, contracted tightly with deliverables and usage rights specified. It is worth least when used as a substitute for the review engine and the group story, the two channels that fill rooms in the months without a launch to celebrate.

How quickly should we see measurable effect?

Review profile movement and response quality are visible within a quarter. Group and meetings pipeline effects take two to three quarters because planner cycles are long. Any agency promising a rating transformation in a month is describing review manipulation, which platforms detect and punish, and which you should treat as a disqualifying answer.

X Modus: How this guide was built, and its limits

This guide draws on the American Hotel and Lodging Association's 2024 State of the Hotel Industry report for performance and employment figures, and on Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI research for guest review behaviour. Both are named in the text where used. Figures are United States industry level unless described otherwise, and review behaviour research is global traveller research. Nothing here substitutes for your own market data, your brand standards or legal counsel in an incident.

XI Incipe: Where Frontier Industries fits

Frontier Industries runs hotel communications as a revenue system: review profile management with property voiced discipline, group and meetings storytelling a sales team can forward, an incident rota with named responders, and reporting written for ownership rather than for applause. The lifestyle coverage still happens. It simply stops being the whole job.

If your property or portfolio is choosing an agency against that standard, begin at https://industries.frontiercapitals.com/start-an-industry-campaign/ or call 401-219-4207. Bring your last ten reviews and your worst incident. Those two documents will organise the entire conversation, which is precisely why we start there.

Sources

1. American Hotel and Lodging Association, 2024 State of the Hotel Industry Report, 2024. https://www.hotelnewsresource.com/article129984.html 2. American Hotel and Lodging Association, 2024 State of the Hotel Industry Report summary, 2024. https://www.hospitality.today/article/ahla-2024-state-of-the-hotel-industry-report 3. Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI, Online Reviews Remain a Trusted Source When Booking Trips, 2019. https://tripadvisor.mediaroom.com/press-releases?item=126297%3FasPDF%3D1&asPDF=1 4. Tripadvisor and Ipsos MORI study coverage, Hospitality Technology, 2019. https://hospitalitytech.com/study-online-reviews-remain-trusted-source-information-when-booking-restaurants-hotels 5. CoStar and STR, United States hotel performance reporting, 2024. https://www.hotelnewsresource.com/article134128.html 6. American Hotel and Lodging Association, About AHLA, 2024. https://www.ahla.com/about-ahla 7. Edelman, Trust Barometer, 2024. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2024/trust-barometer 8. Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Center for Hospitality Research, 2024. https://sha.cornell.edu/business-resources/centers-institutes/hospitality-research/ 9. Phocuswright, Travel research and market intelligence, 2024. https://www.phocuswright.com/ 10. Public Relations Society of America, About PRSA, 2024. https://www.prsa.org/about/about-prsa