Leveraging Hotel Guest Personas for Improved Marketing Results

Understanding your guests is the key to more effective hotel marketing. A well-crafted hotel guest persona ensures that the right travelers see the right messages—whether it’s a mother discovering your kid-friendly amenities or a couple finding a spa package tailored to their romantic getaway. By segmenting guests into distinct archetypes based on preferences and behaviors, hoteliers can craft more personalized campaigns that increase engagement and direct bookings.

According to our latest travel study, 56% of travelers prioritize custom experiences, making personalization more important than ever. By leveraging hotel guest personas, you can deliver targeted promotions, refine your messaging, and optimize marketing efforts to boost occupancy rates and maximize ProPAR.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to build hotel guest personas and use them to create more effective, data-driven marketing campaigns.

Collecting Data on Hotel Guest Personas

Data collection is the first step in creating hotel guest personas and provides a foundation for targeted campaigns. Gather information from several sources to paint a complete picture of your ideal hotel guest personas. Here are some information sources to use when building these archetypes:

Survey Guests

You may know that 30-year-old females are your most loyal customers, but do you know why? If you want to understand what brings guests to stay with you, ask. Surveys provide qualitative answers beyond the data. 

There isn’t one correct way to gather feedback, so you may need to try multiple methods. Encourage feedback with an incentive, like extra rewards or a discount on a future stay. Here are a few ideas to find out how guests discovered your brand and the reasons they booked:

• Inquire with guests during check-in and add this information to your CRM. 
• Provide a survey in a post-stay email or an in-room QR code.
• Incorporate checkboxes on your booking page for guests to provide basic answers.
• Ask for feedback through a pop-up window on the booking confirmation screen.

Dive Into Advanced Analytics

Google Analytics offers information on your audience’s demographics, behavior, preferences and browsing habits. Detailed reports on age, gender and location, plus information on clicks and page views, can reveal patterns between specific traveler types and their interests critical to developing personas.

Review CRM Data

A hotel’s CRM holds the keys to many guest personas because it details booking history and browsing habits. Identify common traits and characteristics to create natural customer archetypes that can inform the process as you begin crafting hotel guest personas. 

Analyze Social Media Insights

Review audience metrics on social platforms to better understand your customers. Information from these channels can guide ad targeting and social media marketing campaigns by telling you more about your guests’ identities and interests, including:

• Age, location and gender
• Income level and occupation
• Education level
• Online content they engage with
• Events, groups and brands they follow

Once you’re armed with data on your guests, it’s time to organize this information to define your target audience segments.

Developing Hotel Guest Personas

Identifying data patterns and creating guest personas requires detailed analytics and an in-depth review. But the payoff of personalized targeting — increased conversion rates, improved occupancy and upsell opportunities — is worth the effort.

Follow these three steps to create guest personas for your hotel: 

1. Combine data collected into your CRM or another analytics tool or database. Use what you have or consider broadening your toolset to include Hubspot, Revinate, Google Analytics, survey tools or an email platform with easy segmentation.
2. Analyze hotel guest information for patterns in customer demographics and their travel tendencies, budgets, purchase behavior and preferred accommodations, then use those patterns to define audience groups. (Consider whether AI tools can help do this faster with less manual input.)
3. Refine the categories you established in step 2, then segment customers into them for campaign personalization and targeting.

Once you understand who your customers are, you can move on to matching them to the marketing channels that will resonate best for their travel occasions, ages or interests.

Selecting Marketing Channels for Traveler Personas

Traveler types define the marketing content and channels that will maximize your ROI and lead to long-term revenue and improved occupancy rates. Hotels should deploy email marketing, content marketing, social media and paid ads based on guest personas’ preferences. 

Here are some factors to consider when targeting by channel:

• Travelers’ ages strongly influence which social feeds are relevant. You likely won’t find retirees looking for a boutique hotel on TikTok, and you wouldn’t target a Gen Z concertgoer on Facebook.
• Basic internet searches influence 70% of travel decisions, so optimizing your Google Business Profile with accurate amenities and prioritizing reviews can increase your hotel’s visibility and boost booking confidence.
• Create PPC ads featuring niche packages to target personas with custom offerings based on past preferences or interests.
• Email marketing campaigns apply to most personas, but you’ll need to consider the content and promotional timing to increase interest in upsells and encourage repeat bookings.

Marketing Ideas for Common Hotel Guest Personas

Use guest personas to attract similar travelers to your property and reengage past guests to build loyalty and repeat revenue streams. Use these marketing campaign ideas to get started connecting with universal hospitality archetypes:

Leisure Travelers

These conventional travelers encompass many ages, occupations and interests. One throughline of this persona is a desire for memorable experiences. Hoteliers should capitalize on advertisement opportunities for leisure travelers by:

• Using stunning visuals to highlight what makes their property different — room features, amenities or on-site events.
• Leveraging social media and hotel marketing influencers to connect with this audience where they browse for travel ideas. 
• Optimizing the website to include the proximity to local attractions and showcase your property as a destination for a complete vacation.
• Advertising last-minute deals and weekend getaway discounts to usher leisure travelers from browsing to booking.

Business Travelers

Business travel has returned, and remote work opportunities open this audience to newcomers. These guests are less concerned with prices and more interested in conveniences and amenities. Targeted marketing campaigns for work-related travelers should:

• Advertise hotel features that make the guest’s work life easier. Our travel study reports high-speed internet (74%), coffee/refreshments (44%) and comfortable workspaces (39%) lead the pack for work-friendly accommodations.
• Promote features to support a work-life balance, such as an on-site gym, recreational amenities, a cocktail lounge or a convenient location.
• Target messages to guests’ corporate email accounts and social feeds conducive to businesses, like Facebook and LinkedIn. 
• Clearly communicate your rewards program and offer upgrades, exclusive services and other perks to earn business travelers’ next reservation.

Family Vacationers

This hotel guest persona is often most concerned with accommodations, convenience and cost. To speak to families looking for easy vacations, fine-tune your marketing campaigns for this persona by:

• Advertising features to simplify getaways, like babysitting services, on-site kid-friendly amenities and complimentary breakfast. 
• Featuring family-friendly rooms, such as suites with kitchenettes and adjoining rooms, in ad campaigns and emails to entice parents to book. 
• Targeting family travelers on your website by creating informative, optimized landing pages on amenities and room choices, and crafting blog posts with enticing itineraries.
• Sending email campaigns with promotions and attraction packages to deliver content that will likely resonate with this persona.
• Using targeted Facebook ads to sell your property as an all-in-one solution for seamless family vacations on the platform popular with these hotel guest personas.

Wellness Travelers

This year, 43% of our travel study respondents would consider a wellness retreat, so hotels should be prepared to market to this growing trend. This guest persona values self-care and expects a fitness center, healthy dining options and a relaxing, restful destination. To attract people who fit into the wellness traveler persona, hotel marketing campaigns should:

• Feature quality images of wellness travel offerings, such as a deep soaking tub, healthy meal options or a workout room. 
• Advertise a custom stay package or wellness retreat in personalized emails or social ads.
• Partner with a local yoga studio or spa to encourage add-on purchases or upgraded packages.
• Highlight testimonials on your social feeds and website, promoting your hotel as a destination for wellness-minded guests.
• Showcase content from a wellness that illustrates their rejuvenating experience and property review.

Luxury Travelers

These guests are often high-income individuals with expectations for personalized offerings and exceptional service. Focus your content development and marketing campaigns on high-quality, stunning visuals that exemplify posh storylines, such as: 

• Short-form video ads showcasing luxurious aspects of the property, from the tranquil on-site spa to the chef-inspired menu. 
• Virtual room tours of premium accommodations, upselling this persona and increasing revenue. 
• Posts highlighting partnerships with luxury brands and affluent influencers to show that your property meets upscale travelers’ needs.

Event-Based Travelers

Your research and guest surveys should alert you to events attracting travelers so you can create campaigns based on these personas. Sporting and fitness activities are sought-after travel experiences for 2025, and music events influence a quarter of travelers’ decisions, as do distinctive social gatherings. Tap into these entertainment-driven personas using these tips:

• Dig into your CRM, social media metrics and studies on the most influential platforms for travel decisions to see which event-based campaigns to run on which channels.
• Use attendees’ ages and incomes to determine whether promoting your rooftop bar or easy-to-use in-room entertainment should be the priority.
• Optimize your booking pages with distances to landmarks and points of interest to highlight your hotel as a convenient home base for concertgoers and festival attendees. 
• Deliver personalized emails to these personas with recommendations for culinary hotspots and area experiences (46% of travelers prioritize local options).

How TravelBoom Can Help You Leverage Guest Personas

Don’t leave potential revenue on the table—hotel guest personas are the secret to unlocking higher engagement, better-targeted promotions, and more direct bookings. By diving into guest data, segmenting your audience, and tailoring your messaging, you ensure that your hotel’s marketing resonates with the right travelers at the right time.

At TravelBoom, we specialize in helping independent hotels optimize their digital marketing strategies with data-driven guest personas. From persona segmentation to high-converting campaigns, our team has the insights and expertise to help you amplify your results.

Need help refining your hotel’s marketing strategy? Contact our team today to start creating campaigns that drive direct bookings and long-term success.

About TravelBoom Hotel Marketing

TravelBoom specializes in developing and executing customized data-driven marketing solutions that drive direct bookings and growth for its clients. With over 25 years of experience in digital marketing for travel and hotels, TravelBoom leverages advanced data science and analytics to uncover insights and develop strategies that greatly enhance results for our clients and reduce reliance on third-party channels. TravelBoom is also host of the world’s #1 ranked Hotel Marketing Podcast and its quarterly Traveler Sentiment Study both of which can be found at www.travelboommarketing.com.