You run an independent hotel against chains and the booking sites that take a cut of every room, and the marketing falls to you between guests. Compass helps you win more direct bookings, lifts the local search and reviews guests choose on, and teaches you the marketing craft your hotel can lean on next year. Try Compass today with a free 90 day growth plan.
It's the shoulder season and the occupancy chart has more gaps than you would like. The online travel agents fill rooms but take 15 to 20 percent, your direct bookings are a trickle, and a chain nearby outspends you on every search. Your reviews are good but the recent ones are thin, your photos do not do the rooms justice, and the marketing that would lift direct bookings competes with running the place. You know the stay is better than the chain's, but turning that into a full diary of direct bookings takes time the front desk swallows. What do you do?
Most hotel marketing advice was written for groups with a revenue manager and a media budget, and the booking sites are happy to keep you dependent on their commission. You have leaned on the OTAs and watched the margin go with them, and the shoulder-season gaps are the ones that worry you. The advice online assumes a marketing team and a spend an independent does not have. It ends in renting your occupancy from the OTAs, discounting to compete, and watching a chain take the direct bookings that should have been yours.
Most AI tools would run your marketing and push you deeper into the channels that already take your margin. Compass works the other way. It pairs the speed of AI with coaching and a feel for how an independent hotel wins direct bookings, so your judgement grows and you learn the marketing as you go.
Compass starts with direct bookings and the trust signals that drive them, because a guest chooses on reviews, photos, and what they find searching before price. It surfaces the Google Business Profile, review, photo, and direct-booking actions that lift your hotel against what your category typically does, and it names the reason behind each one so the craft stays with you. It sets your channel mix to fit an independent, calibrated to your local and seasonal demand rather than a chain model. It teaches you to shift bookings off the OTAs to your own site, to fill the shoulder season with the right guests, and to turn a stay into a return visit and a recommendation.
You stay the one running the hotel, you learn why each one fills the rooms, and you have a senior marketing executive's judgement beside you.
Twenty minutes to get started. You answer a handful of quick questions: your rooms, who your guests are, your seasons, where you already appear online. While you answer, Compass researches your market and surfaces what it finds for you to confirm or correct. Then a short guided conversation captures the rest: your best guests, what success looks like for the next quarter, what marketing you have tried, and how much time you can put behind it.
The free 90 Day Growth Plan lands first: a single on-screen plan personalised to your hotel, with the truth about your market, the guest profiles most worth pursuing, the moments that turn a search into a direct booking, and a 90 day roadmap of the actions that matter most. Your Pro subscription turns that into a full 12 month marketing strategy with deeper research, five guest profiles instead of two, and a monthly cadence that follows your seasons.
A short daily task list, sized to the time you have, anything from one task to a few, organised by guest profile and channel. Some tasks Compass handles in the background, such as Google Business Profile monitoring and review tracking. The rest are short and clear, designed to fit around running the hotel, with the marketing science behind each explained in plain English so you learn the craft as you go.
Hotel marketing has its own canon of science: how a guest chooses on reviews, photos, and search before price, the direct-versus-OTA economics that decide your margin on every room, the seasonal demand maths that shapes the shoulder season, and the loyalty mechanics that turn a stay into a return. Compass applies the science to your hotel and names the reason behind every task in plain English, so you learn your marketing craft every day until one day you won't need Compass anymore.
Pro Plan subscription £19 per month for as long as you stay.