I’ve been involved in dozens of hotels and there are consistent mistakes that are made by even the largest hotel operators.

These are often due to adherence to an outdated model, push from ownership, budgetary constraints or a simple lack of knowledge.

As a hotel owner or investor, here are the top five mistakes I’ve seen at independent hotels.

I’ve worked with dozens of directors of sales and marketing in a traditional hotel model. Responsible for a significant portion of the revenue in the form of signed contracts, these individuals are often incentivized by meeting or beating their sales quotas. Yet, they are constantly being assigned marketing responsibilities as well.

The truth is, marketing is too hard now. There’s too much to learn, the landscape changes every year and a great marketer is a constant student. By requiring a sales professional to oversee marketing, you have doomed them to fail at half their job.

Sometimes it’s even worse than this. An owner or corporate representative will come for a quarterly visit and decide that their Facebook account doesn’t have enough followers. All of the sudden, instead of focusing on massive contracts, removing barriers for sales team members, the director of sales and marketing is now taking bad photos by the pool and posting them on social media. The Facebook page now looks bad, ownership still didn’t get the following they wanted and worse, the hotel has to rely on transient business now to meet their budget.

Don’t distract your director of sales with marketing responsibilities. It’s 2021 now. That era ended in 2005. Hire a director of sales and let them focus on sales.

This is a common mistake of the director of sales and marketing or a general manager who is acting as marketing director. The person hiring an agency for your hotel should know marketing. The cost of this agency will be a substantial investment over the life cycle of your hotel and for every cost, there should be a substantial return on investment.

I’ve taken over at least 10 hotels without competent marketing leadership where an agency contract is in place that is an obvious scam. When a general manager or a director of sales and marketing signs a contract like this, these agencies will have little to no accountability from there on out and will be able to justify their numbers with pretty-looking dashboards. The ultimate tell for a “bad deal” is a line item for “SEO” in your monthly invoice. For the agency, that SEO — search engine optimization — line item is all profit and virtually no benefit to the customer.

Another problem with leaving the agency in charge of marketing is they have the opposite goals of the hotel. The least amount of time they can spend on your hotel, the more profitable your account will be. Your account manager will always have more hotels than they should and won’t have the support in place to handle the needs of their accounts if they are all utilizing the services they are paying for.

There must be oversight of a digital agency for the services that have been contracted or don’t bother hiring one at all. If you just want a dashboard, call any consultant and they can make you one.

This is my least favorite offense of the hospitality industry. Just because you can get cheap photos doesn’t mean you should. A small hotel — rooms only — should be investing a minimum of $15,000 in photography. A large resort should be investing six figures in their photography and videography with plans for more every few years. They should hire serious, commercial photographers who are known for their hospitality work. The shoot should take more than one day and your team needs to be completely invested in making these photos a success. Successful hotel photo shoots don’t begin and end on the same day. There is a shot list, there is thoughtful direction for how the photos should look, someone on the team has come to the property ahead of time to document how light will impact the shoot. Before the shooting even begins, there is a road map for the day. Success is generally dictated before the shoot takes place.

Photos are shared for free by third parties globally. It is the single easiest way to convey how special your property is to a potential guest, no matter how they find you. These photos should be produced by a competent art director and be a direct representation of your hotel’s brand. This is the single most important marketing investment a hotel development will make. Tell your story with your photos or risk being another commodity in your market.

A hotel’s seasons are, for the most part, easy to predict. Hotels know what events drive revenues, what times of year they will be sold out and when driving business will be at its hardest. Therefore, 75% of marketing should be proactive. If the hotel isn’t looking great for this coming weekend, it’s probably too late for marketing to move the needle.

In this situation, not enough of your audience is in the market for your location, for that particular day where it makes sense to distract your marketing team from their proactive work.

This is a task for your revenue team to do its best to convert more business for the coming weekend with lower rates or through opaque channels.

The most successful marketing always seems to happen at hotels that provide incredible guest experiences. Crafting this experience begins before the hotel is constructed and should never end. Hotels that are constantly adding value, reevaluating their offerings and thinking about how to deliver memorable stays always remain on top of their competition.

Their customers are out there talking about their experience, happy to follow them on social media and receive their email campaigns, writing detailed reviews about their experience and can’t wait to come back. Their customers know that they aren’t the cheapest in town, but they feel these hotels are worth it, every time.

An investor can’t make an attractive hotel and charge top market rates and be done.

Marketing should lead in building the hotel’s brand, the operational experience and ongoing programming. They should be working with revenue to identify weekends where rates are more than twice the average to push operations to add value to stays over those periods of time. The more a customer spends, the more they expect.

Someone needs to be relentlessly thinking about the customer experience without also worrying about overtime, a guest distraction or a sales quota.

Most of these issues are resolved by competent marketing leadership. For most hotels across the country, this is dramatically lacking. Owners and investors need to prioritize competent marketing leadership from its operations.

Sam Trotter is a marketing & technology consultant based in the greater Boston area. Follow him on Twitter or at contact him at hello@tomorr.ooo.

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