It’s a Tuesday in November, and your hotel has twelve occupied rooms out of forty available. The dining room of the restaurant next door is dimly lit because there are only two tables set. Three months ago, in August, you had a waiting list and were turning down reservations due to lack of space.<\/p>\n\n
That difference between high season and low season is the central problem of the hospitality industry, and also the reason why email marketing matters more here than in almost any other sector. It’s not about getting new customers from scratch each time: it’s about the guest who stayed in July returning in October, and the couple who dined on a Saturday coming back during the week.<\/p>\n\n
A hotel or restaurant already has, unknowingly, one of the most valuable assets of the business: the email of every person who has booked, dined, or inquired about availability. That contact usually remains dormant in the PMS or on the reservation sheet, with no one writing back. Meanwhile, the room or table\u2014your real product\u2014remains empty just when it is least convenient.<\/p>\n\n
Email marketing solves exactly that: filling the low season with customers who already know you, increasing the average ticket with those who already trust you, and turning a one-time reservation into real loyalty. It doesn’t replace Booking, Google Ads, or reputation on TripAdvisor, but it’s the only channel where the message goes directly, without an algorithm deciding whether to show it or not.<\/p>\n\n
In this guide, you will see how to build that recurrence machine step by step: what advantages it has over other channels, how to structure the contact list, what automations to set up according to the reservation cycle, and five specific campaigns you can launch this week.<\/p>\n\n
Booking and Expedia take a commission of between 15% and 25% for each reservation. An email to your own list costs no commission: it costs the time to write it.<\/p>\n\n
If you have 2,000 contacts of former guests and send them an offer of “three nights, pay for two” for Tuesdays and Wednesdays in February, you are filling the occupancy gap with full margin, not with the margin left by an intermediary.<\/p>\n\n
It’s the difference between relying on a third party to bring you traffic and having the lever yourself to decide which weeks you want to fill first. A hotel with 3,000 room-nights a year that manages to move 10% of those reservations from OTA to direct channel can save several thousand euros in commissions, just with a well-segmented send.<\/p>\n\n
The same applies to the restaurant: a campaign that encourages booking a table by email instead of through a reservation platform that charges per diner reduces the cost of each occupied table, and that difference is noticeable in the month’s margin.<\/p>\n\n
Getting a new reservation costs between 5 and 7 times more than getting a customer to return, according to data commonly handled by the tourism sector. A guest who has already slept in your rooms or dined in your hall already knows the product, they no longer have the initial doubt.<\/p>\n\n
Email is the natural channel to keep that relationship alive between stays. A restaurant that only fills up on weekends can recover customers during the week simply by reminding them it exists, with a Tuesday menu offer or a new menu item.<\/p>\n\n
Guest loyalty doesn’t happen just by providing good service. It happens when that good service is remembered at the right time, and that right time is marked by email, not by the hope that they remember on their own.<\/p>\n\n
Think of the room or table as a perishable product: if it isn’t sold today, that night or service is lost forever, it can’t be stored for tomorrow. Email is the fastest tool to react to that perishability because you can decide today whom to write to and have a response by tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n
Every guest who books, every diner who pays with a loyalty card, every visitor who fills out a contact form is a potential email. The usual problem is not a lack of data: it’s that this data lives scattered between the PMS, the POS, and a notebook at reception.<\/p>\n\n
Start by centralizing. Export emails from the reservation engine, the restaurant’s loyalty program, and any form on the website. A digital check-in or a Wi-Fi card that asks for the email in exchange for the password are simple ways to keep adding contacts without friction.<\/p>\n\n
Always make clear what that person will receive: seasonal offers, menu updates, benefits for being a recurring customer. A clear check-in on the value of the email reduces unsubscribes later on.<\/p>\n\n
Events also generate lists: if you organize wine tastings, pairing dinners, or themed weekends, the registration form is another source of contacts who have already shown real interest, not just passing curiosity.<\/p>\n\n
A business guest booking a night during the week is not the same as a family staying four nights in August. Nor is the restaurant customer who comes once a year on a special date the same as the one who eats there every two weeks.<\/p>\n\n
Segment at least by these criteria from the start:<\/p>\n\n
Type of stay: business, family, couple, group<\/p><\/li>
Frequency: first visit, recurring, VIP<\/p><\/li>
Usual booking season: high, medium, low<\/p><\/li>
Source: direct booking, OTA, walk-in, event<\/p><\/li>
Average spend on additional services (spa, restaurant, minibar)<\/p><\/li><\/ul>\n\n
With this segmentation, you send the low season offer to those who mostly book in low season, and the spa promotion to those who have already used the spa before. Each send gains relevance and stops feeling like generic spam.<\/p>\n\n
A hotel reservation has a clear life cycle: confirmation, reminder before arrival, stay, departure, post-stay follow-up. Each of these moments admits an automatic email that you don’t have to write by hand each time.<\/p>\n\n
Set up a welcome flow as soon as the reservation is confirmed, a reminder 48 hours before with practical information (parking, check-in time, hotel services), and a thank-you email after check-out asking for feedback. It is set up once and works on every reservation that comes in.<\/p>\n\n
A restaurant can set up the same type of flow around a table reservation: confirmation with the link to the menu, reminder on the same day with the schedule and cancellation conditions, and an email two days later asking about the experience. Each automation replaces a manual task that, done by hand for hundreds of reservations, is never done consistently.<\/p>\n\n
The editorial calendar of a coastal hotel cannot be the same in July as in January. Plan sends at least two months in advance of the season you want to strengthen: if February is your weakest month, the “winter getaway” campaign should go out in December, not on January 30th.<\/p>\n\n
Note in an annual calendar the long weekends, local holidays, city events, and low seasons specific to your area. This calendar is the basis of your email plan for the entire year.<\/p>\n\n
Don’t send the same promotion to the entire list just because it coincides in time. The business guest traveling during the week doesn’t react the same to a “romantic weekend getaway” as the couple who only travels on long weekends. Cross seasonality with segment and the message fits better with the recipient.<\/p>\n\n
A vacation chain with hotels in various points along the Mediterranean coast detects every Thursday which establishments will have low occupancy the following weekend. On Friday morning, it sends a segmented email only to subscribers living less than two hours’ drive from those hotels, with a 20% discount valid for booking within the next 48 hours.<\/p>\n\n
The result is not just last-minute occupancy: it’s that the customer, seeing they receive relevant offers for their area and not generic ones, continues to open subsequent emails.<\/p>\n\n
The key to this campaign is not in the discount, but in the segment cut: sending it to the entire list would have diluted the sense of real opportunity and generated unsubscribes from people not interested in traveling that specific week.<\/p>\n\n
A market cuisine restaurant with three locations in the same city launches a customer club: every time someone dines and leaves their email when paying, they enter a list that receives the new tasting menu before anyone else, a notification of available tables when there are last-minute cancellations, and an invitation to an aperitif on their birthday.<\/p>\n\n
In two years, that list exceeds 6,000 contacts, and traditionally slow mid-week nights start to fill with club customers who book upon receiving the notice of available spots.<\/p>\n\n
The detail that makes the difference is speed: the available table notification is sent within minutes of the cancellation, to a small segment close to the three locations, not to the entire database. A free table at 8:30 PM doesn’t wait for someone to open the email the next day.<\/p>\n\n
Design three automatic emails that trigger as soon as a reservation is confirmed:<\/p>\n\n
Confirmation with reservation details and a link to add extra services (parking, dinner, spa)<\/p><\/li>
Reminder 3 days before with practical arrival information and local recommendations<\/p><\/li>
Welcome email on the check-in day with breakfast schedule and direct reception contact<\/p><\/li><\/ol>\n\n
This sequence alone usually increases spending on additional services (parking, breakfast, dinners) because it offers the option to book them before arrival, while the guest is still deciding what they need.<\/p>\n\n
Segment guests who stayed last year in your weakest month and send them, six weeks in advance, an offer with an increasing discount based on lead time: 15% if they book this week, 10% the following week. Real, not forced, urgency moves reservations that would otherwise arrive late or not at all.<\/p>\n\n
If someone starts a reservation on your website and doesn’t finish it, an automatic email two hours later with a summary of what they were looking at and a 5% discount code recovers a portion of those reservations that would otherwise end up on Booking paying a commission.<\/p>\n\n
Three days after check-out, send an email thanking the stay, requesting a review on Google or TripAdvisor, and attaching a discount code for the next direct reservation. Turn the recent experience into two things at once: online reputation and a concrete reason to return.<\/p>\n\n
Separate this send based on the implicit rating of the stay: offer an upgrade on the next visit to those who booked a suite and purchased extra services; to those who came with children, a family promotion for the next school holidays.<\/p>\n\n
A monthly send with what’s happening in your area: festivals, markets, gastronomic openings. It doesn’t sell rooms directly, but keeps your name present and gives a reason to visit beyond the accommodation itself. It’s content that gets forwarded and read even outside the travel season.<\/p>\n\n\n
Acumbamail es la plataforma de email marketing con la que hoteles, restaurantes y alojamientos tur\u00edsticos pueden importar sus contactos desde el PMS o el TPV, segmentarlos por temporada u ocupaci\u00f3n y lanzar automatizaciones de bienvenida, recordatorio o seguimiento post-estancia sin saber programar. Todas las campa\u00f1as de esta gu\u00eda se pueden configurar directamente desde el panel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n