Your hotel’s brand voice is a key commercial asset. Is a broken narrative leaking your direct bookings?
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
When I began working in newspaper newsrooms as a travel journalist, the journey to booking was simpler. Perhaps a hotel would run a print advert in a Sunday supplement, the potential guest would see the advert, maybe read a review, make a reservation, and check in.
But that linear journey just doesn’t exist today. A potential guest might spot your brand while scrolling on social media, they might do a search of your property and read a review summarised by AI. They’ll visit your site to browse your facilities, then once they've booked, they’ll receive a sequence of pre-arrival emails about their stay.
Even once they’re at the property, the experience is different. Maybe you have a Whatsapp concierge widget or an app, perhaps you offer the opportunity to scan a QR code to find out more about in-room dining. Don’t forget the in-room notes confirming experiences and activities, or the post-stay survey.
That’s nearly a dozen communication touchpoints for one simple booking. Can you be sure that your brand voice is consistent across them all?
The high cost of a brand voice breakdown
It happens slowly. Perhaps as you expand to add more properties. Or as you try to keep up with all the demands of your hotel digital marketing.
As the amount of content you need to produce increases, different teams take over. You outsource your PR to one agency, your paid media campaigns to another. Someone in the team is managing your socials and someone else is adding those new offer pages to your website.
Before you know it, you’re looking at your Instagram and it is using a punchy, casual tone, but your website is relying on generic five-star descriptions. Your front desk staff are still following a script you created when you first opened (not to mention producing quick on-property notices themselves when needed) and your booking confirmation email somehow seems to have slipped into a completely different, more corporate tone.
And all this is happening at a time when travellers ask much more of the brands they book with. When competition is fiercer and online travel agents (OTAs) are snapping at your heels and carving into your profit margins.
When your brand voice breaks down between channels, you ruin that luxury illusion. Those subtle frictions start to erode trust.
Subconsciously, travellers begin to question the value of a stay with you. Perhaps they were looking to splash out on something special and suddenly they wonder if they should really be spending that much.
Maybe they decide to go back to the drawing board and compare prices with your competitors. Where’s the easiest place to do that? An OTA. Even if they choose you in the end, it only takes one click book there and then you’ve just paid 20 per cent in commission for a guest that was right on your doorstep.
Your hotel brand voice is a commercial asset
When you’re looking at your hospitality brand as a whole, its tone of voice hotel can feel like a soft, cosmetic exercise. You’re dealing with revenue managers and looking at your marketing spend for the year, surely that’s just a “nice to have” extra?
But it isn’t. A consistent brand voice is a commercial asset. In today’s fractured marketing environment, it’s more important than ever. And with experiential luxury set to take 35 per cent of the global luxury market by 2030, you can be sure you want high-net-worth individuals choosing you.
The brand experience is everything and if you’re not getting it right, people will just go elsewhere.
Still wondering how your brand voice affects your bottom line? Here are a few reasons…
1. Brand voice builds trust
Consistency signals competence. If your hotel offers a flawless experience across multiple touchpoints, that immediately provides peace of mind to the guest that every detail will be seamless during their stay. You make that sense of luxury feel effortless. Subconsciously, the guest breathes a sigh of relief, knowing that you will be there to take care of every detail of their stay.
2. It protects your average daily rate (ADR)
That generic copy on your website talking about spacious rooms and listing commodities? It treats your hotel as a commodity and that means people will start comparing you on price. And while they’re at it, they may just go to an OTA to compare rates side by side. And then they’re just a button away from booking that way.
3. It makes you uncopyable
The corporate chains can snap up real estate and create a boutique feel, but they’ll always be beholden to those rigid frameworks. That prevents them from developing the warm, human voice that really helps you connect with guests. By developing your distinct verbal personality and being nimble enough to apply it across touchpoints in different ways, you create something authentic that can’t be mass-produced.
So you want to invest in your brand voice, what’s the next step?
When the guest journey is so fragmented and your hospitality brand is growing how do you maintain that distinctive verbal identity? Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you establish and maintain your brand voice, no matter how many people are working on your brand assets…
1. Start with a content audit
You can’t make changes without knowing where you stand now. To check if you’re experiencing what we call “brand drift” and detect the areas where your narrative bleeds out, you need to conduct an audit.
You need to map out all the channels that a guest will encounter. That takes you from those top-of-funnel social media posts through to your website, from the email sequences you send out to the room-service menus and the scripts staff use at the front desk, or within your in-house sales teams.
Compare them side by side and audit them critically. Do they sound like they were written by the same genial host? Perhaps you’ve worked on creating a glossy tone for your socials, but your emails sound like an automated message. Or those on-property assets you’ve been creating sound nothing like the tone of voice on your website.
At Peregryn, a content alignment audit is among the bespoke services we offer. As a journalist, it’s something that I love, as I can really pore over those details and detect where that verbal friction is hurting conversation rates and guest trust. We can look at what’s working, what isn’t and the simple steps we can take to eliminate mismatched messaging.
2. Establish your verbal signature
Back when you created your brand book, you probably set out some parameters for your hotel brand voice. Something like “Our tone is sophisticated yet welcoming”. That’s great, but what does that actually mean?
You need to go beyond the basics and really add some detail. Are you understated? Vibrant? Eccentric? Then go beyond the “what” to the “how” and set out exact instructions for your different teams, otherwise you will end up with 12 different takes on what eccentric or vibrant mean.
Make sure you provide examples of what is and isn’t acceptable for each of your brand voice attributes. Provide clear do and don’t guidelines and examples. For example, if your tone is sophisticated but welcoming, you could note:
Don’t be too stiff and corporate
Eg. Guests are cordially invited to join us for pre-dinner drinks in the salon
Don’t be too casual
Eg. Grab a drink and join us at the bar before tucking in to dinner
Do keep your tone elegant and authoritative.
Eg. Join us in the lounge for an aperitif before your table is ready - we’ll have the logfire lit
Take this opportunity to list those well-worn travel cliches that shouldn’t be used. For example, don’t rely on overused and empty words like “breathtaking” and “luxury”.
And you can outline any words that your brand always uses and words it never uses, so that teams across all the different touchpoints are in line.
3. Treat transaction copy as an editorial asset
Sometimes we can be so focused on creating evocative copy for brochures and the website that we let more transactional content slip through the net.
The first victim is often those automated emails. Perhaps it’s just an email confirming a booking, announcing a new offer or asking a guest to fill out a post-stay survey. But it's more than that. Each email is a chance to have a conversation with your guest.
Email marketing is a key part of your hotel content marketing strategy and offers some of the highest ROI, according to Campaign Monitor - thanks to relatively low costs and strong email open and conversion rates when harnessed correctly - so you want to make sure you get it right.
Equally, there can be other areas where you miss the opportunity to create more engaging copy and drive action. Take your room descriptions. You may feel like you simply need to list the key attributes so people can compare and contrast the different options.
But once again, you’re treating your rooms as a commodity and people can get that information from OTAs. So use this opportunity to paint a picture of what a stay in these rooms is like and help potential guests picture themselves there.
4. Go beyond the script for frontline staff
Your front desk staff, F&B teams and concierges are your most influential brand communicators. They’re the ones who bring your brand promise to life on property. Think of them as your brand custodians.
So you don’t want them to rely on rigid scripts. A better way to support them is through training sessions that focus on your core hotel brand identity and values. Then they can use this knowledge to inspire their more natural tone when dealing with guests, helping create that sense of authentic warmth.
Your on-property staff are often the ones tasked with drafting a welcome letter for a VIP, writing a quick email confirming a restaurant booking, or typing up an apology note for a maintenance issue. They become the unofficial copywriters of your hotel.
Rather than leaving them to figure things out on the fly, create a library of templates that are brand-aligned and give them customisable structures, so they can work quickly while feeling confident that the brand voice is consistent.
A brand voice can boost your bookings
The days of a simple, linear guest journey are officially over. In today’s hyper-fragmented digital landscape, a traveller will interact with your brand across half a dozen touchpoints before they even reach your booking engine.
If your narrative breaks down along the way, across channels, you introduce verbal friction that undermines your hotel brand positioning and sends prospective guests to an OTA.
Compelling travel marketing is about more than beautiful photos on social media and glossy ads. Now you need to create an uninterrupted, emotionally resonant storyline that will wrap a guest in your brand experience from first click to final farewell.
When you elevate your storytelling and eliminate those points of verbal friction, you stop competing on price and create a resilient hospitality brand. You’re not a commodity anymore, selling a place to sleep, you’re an experience. You build trust, create relationships and encourage guests to return time and again.
Struggling to maintain a unified brand voice?
At Peregryn, we work with independent luxury hotels and boutique groups to help you define your authentic voice and build the blueprint you need to boost conversions and protect direct revenue.
As a hospitality branding agency run by journalists, we know the importance of storytelling and quality hotel copywriting, putting our decades of experience at our service so you can help your teams strip away the generic marketing fluff and deliver a seamless narrative across every single guest touchpoint.
