Blog : Strategy

Why long gaps make relationship marketing more important

Seasonality is often treated as a convenient alibi in travel marketing. When bookings slow, campaigns pause. When guests disappear from view, communication goes quiet, explained away with a familiar shrug: It’s seasonal. The implication is subtle but powerful. If demand is cyclical, then silence feels justified.

But this logic mistakes rhythm for absence. Seasonality does not weaken the case for CRM. It strengthens it. In travel, long gaps between purchases are not an exception or an edge case. They are the structural reality of the category. That reality makes relationship marketing harder, certainly, but also more necessary. When time stretches between moments of intent, continuity becomes the work.

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Different data, different mandates, same strategic blind spots

Travel CRM is often discussed as if every organization is facing the same fundamental challenge: collect guest data, automate communications, drive bookings, repeat. It is a clean, reassuring narrative. It is also a misleading one.

Hotels, attractions, and destination marketing organizations all operate within the same travel ecosystem, but they do not begin from the same place. They do not have access to the same data, they are not accountable for the same outcomes, and they are not responsible for the same moments in the guest journey. Treating them as interchangeable CRM actors leads to strategies that feel technically correct but operationally strained, and to programs that underperform not because of execution, but because of misalignment.

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Why linear models fail cyclical travel behavior across the guest journey

For years, travel marketing has relied on a familiar mental model: the funnel. Guests enter at the top, progress steadily downward, and eventually convert. It’s tidy, measurable, and reassuring. And in travel, it consistently misrepresents how decisions are actually made.

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Why short-term optimization quietly undermines long-term guest value

Two Ways of Seeing the Guest

In travel, relationship marketing is built interaction by interaction. And every interaction carries meaning.

A confirmation email, a pre-arrival reminder, a post-stay message. Each one shapes how a guest perceives a brand, not just in the moment, but over time. Yet many travel organizations approach these interactions through a narrow lens, optimizing for the next conversion rather than the ongoing relationship.

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Email marketing is often framed as a contradiction.

Depending on who you ask, it is either a relationship marketing channel built on trust, permission, and long-term value, or a high‑performance sales tool optimized for conversions, revenue, and measurable results.

This framing is not only misleading; it actively limits how organizations design, measure, and deploy email programs.

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Yes, we can learn to love statistics and A/B testing

I am a big fan of optimization and A/B testing. But that was not always the case. When I was studying for my MBA at HEC in the 1980s, the most challenging courses I enrolled in was Statistics and Probabilities. This course, loaded with obscure equations, was meaningless gibberish to me. And I couldn’t see how it could be useful in real life except maybe for surveys.

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