How stronger hotel branding drives direct bookings and higher ADR

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, sits down with Tomas Bäcklund, Chief Marketing Officer at Elite Hotels of Sweden, for a conversation that challenges some of the industry's most persistent assumptions about where revenue growth comes from. Tomas is not a career hotelier — he came from the creative agency world, was headhunted as a candidate for the CMO role at Elite Hotels, and pitched his way into the job with a 35-slide deck built over a weekend. That outsider perspective has defined his leadership: while most of the industry focuses on distribution and efficiency, Tomas has spent five years making the case that brand is the single most underinvested revenue lever in hospitality.

What you'll learn:

● Brand is why Gucci charges 8,000% more than a basic t-shirt: Tomas uses the fashion industry's most familiar example to make a point the hotel industry consistently misses. The quality difference between a luxury brand and a generic product does not justify the price gap. Brand does. The same logic applies to ADR, and most hotels have not learned to use it.

● Margins are compressing and brand is the only sustainable fix: Costs of labor, goods, and rentals have risen sharply across the last five years. Hotel prices have not kept pace. The result is a margin squeeze that most companies respond to by cutting costs — including marketing. Tomas's argument is that the opposite approach, investing in brand to support price increases, is the one that actually works.

● Elite Hotels grew direct website booking share by nearly ten percent in five years: This is not a theoretical argument. Under Tomas's leadership, the share of bookings coming through Elite Hotels' own website has risen significantly — a result he attributes to a combination of brand investment, website usability improvements, and loyalty program development working in parallel.

● The 95-5 rule changes how you think about hotel marketing: At any given moment, 95% of potential guests are not ready to buy. Hotel marketing that focuses exclusively on the bottom of the funnel — people already close to booking — is only ever talking to existing customers. Growing means building relationships with people in all three layers of the funnel, including those who currently book elsewhere, over a long enough time frame that they are positioned to choose you when they are ready.

● Human touch is becoming the next luxury: As more hotel operations automate, Tomas predicts a bifurcation in the market between fully automated, cost-efficient experiences and premium hospitality where the human element is the product. "I think that human touch will be the next luxury. I really do."

● Retail brands outperform hospitality on brand building — despite having less time with customers: Retailers have guests for fifteen minutes. Hotels have them for twenty-four hours. And yet retail consistently produces more creative, emotionally resonant brand building. Tomas draws inspiration from Jonathan Anderson's transformation of Loewe, Demna Gvasalia's reinvention of Balenciaga, and Soho House's global name recognition built on twenty hotels. These, he argues, are the case studies hotel CMOs should be studying.

● Sweden's hotel pricing problem illustrates a global brand failure: Sweden is one of Europe's most expensive countries for almost everything except hotels. Stockholm ADR sits between Slovenia and Bulgaria in European comparisons. The reason, Tomas argues, is not market conditions, it is a decade of under-investment in communicating why a hotel experience is worth paying for.

● Physical and mental availability both have to work: Borrowing from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Tomas frames direct booking growth as requiring two things simultaneously — mental availability (brand strength, relevance, desire) and physical availability (a website that is easy to book from). Expedia employs 4,200 data scientists focused almost entirely on making their platform easier to use. Most hotels are competing against that with far fewer resources. Both sides of the equation have to be working.

● The hospitality industry recycles the same marketing ideas: Tomas observes that senior marketing executives in hospitality tend to move between the same pool of companies, producing the same ideas. His case: a former CMO of Coca-Cola or Nike would likely revolutionise hotel marketing precisely because they come from outside the circular thinking of the industry.

Dylan and Tomas also discuss the founding story of Elite Hotels — built by Bicky Chakraborty, who arrived in Sweden from Calcutta in 1966 with nothing and created one of the country's most famous hospitality brands through sheer force of personality and relentless PR — and what that founding story reveals about brand building at its most raw.

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Connect with Tomas Bäcklund here:

Connect with Dylan Cole here:

Follow the podcast here:

Episode Highlights

[00:00] Brand is how you charge more — Tomas opens with the idea that has shaped his five years in hotel marketing: "What I've been going around telling people in the last five years is that there's another way of doing things. If you increase your brand, you can charge more. You see this in every single industry all over the world." It is a simple argument — and one he argues the hospitality industry has consistently failed to act on.

[05:47] Why human touch is becoming the next luxury — Reflecting on the contrast between the most memorable hotel stay of his life — a 12-villa property in the Philippines run by a couple who trained every local staff member from scratch — and the worst, a visually perfect cliff-top hotel in southern Italy with terrible food and service, Tomas draws a line that runs through the rest of the conversation: "The more we go into AI and the more everything is automated, I think that human touch will be the next luxury. I really do." For premium and luxury hotels, he argues, the human element is not a cost to be optimised away — it is the product.

[11:42] The forgotten revenue lever — Tomas makes his core strategic case with unusual directness. As inflation drives up costs and margins compress, most companies respond by cutting — including cutting marketing. His alternative: "If you increase your brand, you can charge more. You see this in every single industry all over the world." He illustrates with a brand equity study run by Kantar in Sweden in 2023, where one hotel competitor ranked in the top 30 brands nationally on brand strength relative to pricing power — meaning they could raise prices significantly without losing guests. "And yet I don't see any of that happening in Sweden."

[22:00] Why the same ideas keep going round — Tomas identifies a structural problem in hotel marketing leadership: senior executives move between the same pool of companies, recycling the same thinking. "Everyone has basically the same ideas going round and round and round." His solution is to hire marketing talent from outside the industry. "If you take Coca-Cola's or Nike's former CMO — do you think they'll do a bad job in the hospitality industry? I think they would revolutionise the place. Because marketing is a different beast. You don't have to know hospitality in order to be good at marketing. You need to know marketing in order to be good at marketing."

[27:35] How to grow direct bookings — the full picture — Asked what advice he would give a hotel leader wanting to strengthen brand and drive direct bookings simultaneously, Tomas offers the most complete strategic framework of the episode. Brand investment builds desire in the 95% of potential guests not currently ready to buy. Website usability converts that desire into bookings when they are. Loyalty keeps them coming back. "The stronger the brand you have, the more people will come to you directly. And then there's the complexity — the harder it is to purchase from your own website, the less people will buy from it." All three elements have to work together.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:42 - Tomas Bäcklund and Elite Hotels of Sweden
02:12 - The best hotel in the world and what made it great
05:47 - Why human touch is becoming the next luxury
06:58 - How a brand outsider became a hotel CMO
11:42 - Why branding is the forgotten revenue lever in hospitality
17:50 - Sweden's hotel pricing problem and what it reveals about brand