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Image Credit Cogwheel Marketing
Cogwheel Analytics, a leading business intelligence platform for the hospitality industry, is pleased to announce the appointment of Ben Golson as Chief Operating Officer and Partner. Golson officially assumed his new role on May 12th, 2025, and will oversee day-to-day operations, team development, and strategic execution as the company continues its rapid growth across enterprise hotel portfolios.
Golson brings over a decade of experience in hospitality marketing, analytics, and revenue strategy, most recently serving as Vice President of Digital Marketing & eCommerce at McKibbon Hospitality. In addition to leading performance marketing, distribution, and marketing business intelligence for more than 100 Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG properties, Golson also oversaw the Revenue Management team during a post-COVID restructuring period from March 2020 to May 2021. During this time, he played a key role in realigning commercial strategy, uniting Revenue Management and eCommerce teams, and driving a more accountable, performance-focused culture. Under his leadership, McKibbon’s hotel website revenue grew from $56 million in 2012 to over $221 million in 2024, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 12%. His efforts helped transform the company’s digital strategy, implement new BI tools, and deliver measurable gains in direct bookings and channel contribution.
In addition to his operational role, Golson will help shape the company’s product roadmap and partnerships as Cogwheel expands its footprint to incorporate more predictive and prescriptive analytics. His expertise in both hotel digital marketing and revenue management will accelerate breaking down of data silos.
His industry leadership includes contributions to Marriott’s Digital Franchise Committee, Hilton’s MEC eCommerce Forum, Hyatt’s Commercial Incubator, and the HSMAI Marketing Advisory Board.
For more information about Cogwheel Analytics, please visit www.cogwheelanalytics.com.
Contact: Stephanie Smith
CEO & Digital Matriarch
Cogwheel Analytics
540-239-1052
stephanie@cogwheelanalytics.com
Cogwheel®️ Analytics is a hotel digital marketing reporting and business intelligence tool for hotel management companies and ownership groups of both branded and independent hotels. It aggregates data from multiple sources to allow companies to identify trends and opportunities, in both portfolio and individual hotel level views. It provides an online scorecard with benchmarks against other hotels to identify gaps in your total online presence, similar to a STAR report. With one-click reports, owners and operators can understand the efforts made towards gaining more exposure across the customer journey. Unlike most tools in the hospitality industry, Cogwheel Analytics primarily focuses on booked revenue, not consumed, to map the various data points up to the point of conversion. Sample data points include channel mix, website performance, social media and paid efforts including OTA Ads, MetaSearch and Google SEM.
