Solving the biggest growth challenges for multi-site hospitality brands
Angie Elsley
Angie Elsley is Open Partners' Growth Director, with over 30 years' experience in scaling ambitious brands.
Hospitality and other multi-site brands face a seemingly impossible task: marketing as one coherent national brand while ensuring hundreds or even thousands of individual sites remain competitive in their local markets.
Too often, these ambitions collide with legacy structures, limited budgets, and fast-moving local competitors, leaving many individual venues at a disadvantage despite a robust, centralised marketing effort.
Compounding these challenges is AI-driven disruption that will be felt at the central level where marketing campaigns are managed. Across the board, AI is rapidly reshaping consumer behaviour, including how consumers discover and engage with hospitality brands and what content best resonates with them in a content-led digital world. On top of this, advertising effectiveness and best practice has changed in nearly every channel, with marketers grappling to transition from legacy marketing strategies to AI-driven automation and creative-first approaches.
In today’s challenging economic landscape, it’s more critical than ever that hospitality brands can trust every marketing pound drives real, incremental gain. Reaching the right audience with the right message, at the right time, is essential to boosting footfall, spend, and brand trust – ultimately keeping doors open.
Below, we explore the biggest legacy challenges facing hospitality, examine how AI-driven disruption is reshaping individual channels and overall performance, and outline the strategic steps brands must take to drive measurable results in 2025 and beyond.
Legacy marketing challenges in Hospitality
National brands needing hyper-local relevance
Each site operates in a unique context – different demographics, competitor activity, and seasonal trends. Centralised campaigns often fail to capture these nuances, leaving individual venues struggling against smaller, more agile competitors who tailor marketing directly to their local catchment.
Disconnected data causing disjointed marketing
Most hospitality brands rely on legacy booking systems, siloed POS data, and outdated CRM tools. Without a single customer view, campaigns cannot be effectively targeted, personalised, or measured. Decisions are based on incomplete insights, making ROI opaque and spend optimisation difficult.
Slow market responsiveness
Manually managing campaigns across dozens or hundreds of sites takes time. By the time a centrally planned campaign launches, local conditions may already have shifted, leaving missed opportunities to respond to competitor activity or sudden changes in footfall.
Big ambitions, tight budgets
Marketing teams are often under-resourced, with most investment prioritised for operations and guest experience. Limited budgets make it difficult to test new channels, adopt emerging digital tools, or make big strategic changes that may be perceived as a risk, leaving hospitality behind other industries in digital maturity.
Compounded by the rapid pace of the AI-led digital landscape
These structural challenges are amplified by the rapid evolution of the digital landscape, placing traditional hospitality marketing strategies under increasing strain:
Paid performance degradation
Paid search and programmatic campaigns are delivering diminishing returns even as budgets rise, driving up Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and reducing Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). For hospitality brands, this means higher costs to attract bookings, reservations, or footfall, with fewer measurable outcomes per pound invested.
Organic visibility decline
Hospitality brands are seeing rapid declines in organic search visibility, website traffic, and on-site conversions. Changes in how search engines and AI-driven discovery platforms surface information make it harder for individual venues to appear in relevant local searches, limiting visibility for both national campaigns and local sites.
Social engagement erosion
Paid social campaigns are generating lower engagement and fewer conversions. Audiences are increasingly selective, and generic content struggles to stand out, signalling declining relevance among the very segments hospitality brands need to attract to fill tables, rooms, or experiences.
These challenges are particularly acute for multi-site hospitality businesses, where centralised campaigns must balance brand consistency with hyperlocal relevance. Brands that fail to adapt risk losing market share, underperforming against more agile competitors, and seeing overall revenue growth stall in a highly competitive environment.
Above all, declines across these channels erode return on investment, undermining confidence in marketing spend and further limiting the resources available to drive future success.
The path forward: Building a digitally resilient hospitality brand
To overcome the growing complexity of hospitality marketing, brands must shift from fragmented, reactive activity to an integrated, AI-driven ecosystem that connects national strategy with local execution.
Below, we’ve outlined the strategic priorities for hospitality brands that will empower their marketing efforts and turn legacy challenges and AI disruption into opportunities for growth:
| Strategic priority | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Adopt an AI-first marketing approach | Embedding AI and automation across paid, social, and search channels allows brands to act at speed, optimise in real time, and ensure marketing investment drives measurable outcomes. |
| Centralise and activate data | A unified data infrastructure gives marketing teams a single customer view, enabling smarter segmentation, precise attribution, and confident budget decisions. |
| Balance national scale with local relevance | By layering first-party data and local insights into campaign planning, brands can deliver hyper-relevant experiences while maintaining national brand consistency. |
| Invest in AI literacy and digital transformation | Developing AI literacy across leadership and marketing functions ensures smarter strategic decisions, better technology adoption, and long-term competitive advantage. |
| Future-proof creative and content | Dynamic creative optimisation and AI-assisted personalisation enable campaigns to stay relevant, ensuring audiences see content that reflects their real-time context and intent. |
Easier said than done? Not exactly.
We recognise that for some brands, what we’re outlining above represents a significant strategic undertaking. For hospitality businesses already managing tight margins, rising operational costs, and shifting consumer expectations, large-scale digital transformations at this scale can be daunting.
However, the commercial reality is clear: the cost of inaction far outweighs the cost of transformation. Inefficient marketing spend, declining ROI, and lost market share to more agile competitors are now existential risks for multi-site hospitality brands.
So, what are hospitality brands to do? The imperative action is to act now; to future-proof your business through an AI-led digital strategy that meets the unique needs of hospitality.
As The Agency of Next, our mission is think about the future so our clients don’t have to. As a result of that ethos, we’ve helped hospitality brands, as well as other nationwide businesses with multi-site operations (leisure, homebuilding, and hotels) overcome large scale, complex digital challenges at an organisational level and deliver significant material growth for the business.
We’ve achieved this through our client-first approach, working closely with our clients’ marketing, strategy, and even financial teams to develop robust growth and investment frameworks, supercharged by our market-leading advertising technologies that solve the specific digital challenges hospitality brands face today.
Here’s an example of that:
Case study: Leading UK hospitality chain
In a highly competitive market, one of our hospitality clients has grown its multi-brand, multi-location business through a true partnership with Open Partners.
Our own proprietary advertising solutions were a key part of this success, facilitating an ‘Always On’ Hyperlocal performance campaign that capitalised on live consumer demand for nearby venues, while our Paid Social strategy diversified channels and allowed targeted personalisation to drive consumer demand and footfall.
The results speak for themselves:
+5.5 million new customers
£178 million incremental revenue
7× increase in marketing investment
£4.1 return on investment
YouGov data also shows increased brand awareness and consideration, directly aligned with these campaigns, for long-lasting impact.
What are your growth ambitions?
Whether you are a national pub, bar, restaurant, hotel, or leisure chain navigating the challenges above, Open Partners can help. Get in touch to learn more about our innovative advertising solutions that deliver transformative outcomes for hospitality brands.
