Gmail’s Gemini Era: What It Means for Hotel Email Marketing

How Gmail’s Gemini AI is changing hotel email performance

Google has officially entered a new phase of inbox intelligence. With the rollout of Gmail features powered by Gemini AI, the inbox is no longer just a place where emails arrive. It is becoming an AI-curated feed that prioritizes relevance, engagement, and perceived importance.
For hoteliers, this shift represents more than a product update. It signals a fundamental change in how marketing emails are evaluated, surfaced, and consumed by guests. While traditional deliverability still matters, visibility is now determined by how much attention your emails earn.

What’s changing in Gmail 

Gmail’s Gemini-powered updates introduce several new capabilities, but not all of them directly impact email marketing performance. Understanding the difference is key.

AI overviews help individual users summarize long email threads and ask natural-language questions such as “What hotel did we stay at in Charleston last fall?” These features are designed for productivity and search within the inbox. While useful for end users, they do not directly influence whether a marketing email gets seen.

Help me write and suggested replies assist users with drafting and responding to emails. Again, these tools are largely about convenience rather than inbox placement.

The most significant change for marketers is AI Inbox prioritization. 

Gmail will increasingly rank emails based on engagement and relevance, surfacing high-priority messages and “VIP” senders while pushing lower-value content out of view. In other words, delivery no longer guarantees visibility. Your email may technically arrive, but if Gmail’s AI decides it is not important to the user, it may never meaningfully appear in the inbox.

This shift is subtle, but its impact is profound.

Why this matters for hotels

Hotel email programs often face unique challenges. Long-standing guest lists, infrequent engagement cycles, and broad promotional sends can all work against engagement over time.

Gemini’s AI is designed to reward senders who consistently deliver value and penalize those who generate noise. That means hotels with strong engagement practices stand to benefit, while those relying on volume-based strategies may see performance decline even if their emails are technically delivered.

The inbox is becoming less about who shows up and more about who earns attention.

The new performance reality

As AI-driven inbox ranking becomes more prevalent, several shifts are likely to emerge.

The performance gap will widen. Brands that maintain high engagement will gain more visibility, while low-engagement senders risk being deprioritized. This creates a compounding effect where good engagement leads to better placement, which then drives more engagement.

Segmentation becomes essential. Sending relevant content to active subscribers is no longer just best practice. It is a requirement for maintaining inbox visibility. Broad, one-size-fits-all sends dilute engagement signals and train the AI to treat your emails as less important.

Engagement becomes training data. Opens, clicks, and interactions tell Gemini which emails matter to a user. Consistently low engagement teaches the system that your messages are noise, even if recipients once opted in.

For hotels, this means that legacy lists and “blast” strategies pose more risk than ever before.

What hoteliers should do now

The good news is that this shift does not require a complete reinvention of email marketing. It requires discipline, focus, and a renewed commitment to guest value.

Audit and clean your lists. Regularly remove or suppress subscribers who have not engaged in the last six months. Keeping unengaged contacts may inflate list size, but it actively harms performance under AI-driven inbox models.

Focus on guest value, not volume. Every send should answer a simple question: Why would a guest want to open this? Exclusive offers, relevant local experiences, loyalty benefits, and timely information consistently outperform generic promotions.

Personalize and segment thoughtfully. Use booking history, stay preferences, location, and past engagement to guide messaging. Relevance is one of the strongest signals Gemini uses to determine importance.

Test frequency with intention. More emails do not automatically lead to more revenue. In many cases, reducing frequency while improving relevance can increase engagement and overall performance.

Monitor the right metrics. While traditional inbox placement reporting may not be available in all platforms, domain-level KPIs, engagement trends, and performance by segment provide critical insight into how your emails are being perceived. Attention placement is becoming just as important as delivery.

What has not changed

It is important to note what Gemini does not replace.

Email authentication still matters. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC remain foundational requirements for deliverability. Gemini adds a new layer on top of these standards rather than replacing them.

If your authentication is weak, your emails will still struggle to reach the inbox at all. But even with perfect authentication, engagement now determines how visible your emails are once they arrive.

The bigger picture 

Google’s Gemini update reflects a broader trend across digital communication. Platforms are increasingly using AI to filter, rank, and personalize content on behalf of users. The inbox is simply the next frontier.

For hotels, this shift reinforces something that has always been true: successful email marketing is built on relevance, trust, and respect for the guest’s attention.

Hotels that have invested in permission-based lists, thoughtful segmentation, and meaningful content are well positioned to thrive in this new environment. Those that have relied on volume, outdated lists, or generic messaging will need to adapt quickly.

The bottom line

Gmail’s Gemini-powered inbox does not change the fundamentals of email marketing. It sharpens them.

The inbox is no longer a chronological list. It is a curated experience shaped by AI. Earning a place in that experience requires more than sending emails. It requires earning engagement.

If you have been doing email right, this evolution works in your favor. If not, now is the time to refocus, refine, and rebuild with attention in mind. And if you need help navigating this shift and strengthening your email strategy, choosing a proven hospitality partner like Cendyn can help your hotel stay visible, relevant, and competitive.

Haydee Fernandez is the Associate Director, Customer Benchmarking & Recommendations at Cendyn. Connect with Haydee on LinkedIn.

About Cendyn

Cendyn is a global hospitality cloud-based technology company that enables hotels to Find, Book, Grow – driving revenue, maximizing profitability, and creating deeper connections with guests through its integrated solutions.

Serving hoteliers for nearly 30 years, Cendyn has over 32,000 customers in more than 150 countries including brands Outrigger Hospitality, Hyatt, IHG, Aman Resorts & Hotels, Relais & Châteaux, Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts, Coraltree Hospitality, and Onyx Hospitality Group – generating more than $20 billion in annual hotel revenue. The company supports its growing customer base with offices across the globe.

To find out more, visit cendyn.com.