I build & manage unique hotels with the highest returns in hospitality. Learn how to grow your vision and go from commodity STRs to boutique hotels.
Is your property "different"?
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Modern Hospitality Playbook: What does a 14-follower glamping property have in common with a 130-room Hyatt and the most-followed hotel on Instagram? The same playbook. Here's what it did for each of them. I hear this one constantly: “Ben, I love what you teach… But our property is different.” Usually followed by one of these:
And I understand it. Before you commit to anything, you want to see proof it works for a property like yours. In recent newsletters, I’ve walked through the principles we use to help our properties and our partners' properties make more money, raise rates, and own their demand. Today, I want to show you what happens when you put those principles into action. THE WRONG WAYMost operators I talk to believe the playbooks I share probably work. They’ve seen the numbers, follow the case studies and watched the reels. But they’re waiting... Waiting to see the exact case study that matches their property before they start.
And in the meantime: Another year goes by with OTA commissions, no guest data and reactive pricing against comps instead of building demand on your own terms. The proof exists. It just doesn’t look like the property they’ve already decided it won’t work for. THE CASE STUDIESLet me walk you through four different properties. Property 1: Elk Hollow Resort — Bryson City, NCSafari glamping tents. Near the Smoky Mountains. No marketing presence when they started. When they came to us, they had 14 Instagram followers (14, not 14,000) and $3,400 in total direct booking revenue. Four months after applying the principles:
The principle: Building an audience and building a booking engine happen at the same time. Content drives attention. Attention, funneled correctly, drives reservations. Consistency is the prerequisite. If you’re waiting to grow your following before you start converting, Elk Hollow is the case study. They built both in the same four months. Read more: 14 followers to $77K in direct bookings Property 2: Alila Marea Beach Resort — Encinitas, CA (Hyatt Boundless Collection)130-room luxury beach resort. Managed by Hyatt. The kind of property most operators assume already has this handled. The challenge was the same one we see everywhere: well-crafted content that looked polished but had no reach or engagement. In other words, 'brochure content'. After applying the principles:
The principle: Content earns revenue when it shows the full experience of the property in a single reel. This kind of content leads to engagement and more importantly, traffic to your hotel website and booking engine. The principles we teach are about connecting what you post to what you earn. That connection works the same whether you have 14 followers or a Hyatt flag above the door. A 130-room Hyatt and a 14-follower glamping camp had the same content problem. Neither had a funnel behind their posts. They didn't understand how to use content to meet their ideal guests where they were at. The fix was the same for both. Read more: How a Hyatt went viral Property 3: Spoon Mountain Glamping — Wimberley, TXLuxury safari tents. 45 minutes from Austin. A small market where operators often tell themselves the demand isn’t there. They came to us to grow their attention on social and increase revenue. Within one year of applying the principles:
The principle: Content drives demand. Pricing captures the value of that demand. When you learn to run both together, they compound. Most operators run one or the other. The Accelerator teaches you to run both. A “small market” glamping property 45 minutes from Austin now runs at 82% direct bookings and grew revenue by 68% in a year. Same property. Same market. Revenue up 68%. Read more: The 6-word hook behind 21M views Property 4: Azulik — Tulum, Mexico2.4 million Instagram followers. The most-followed hotel on Instagram in the world. If there’s a property that looks like it has this figured out from the outside, it’s Azulik. And in a lot of ways, they do. But the issue I covered in the newsletter linked below is one I keep coming back to: Having a large following and converting that following into direct bookings are two completely different things. Reach without a thought through direct booking funnel stops at just driving attention but just 90 days after applying the principles...
The principle: The goal is guests. Content that builds an audience without moving people toward a booking leaves revenue behind, at 14 followers and at 2.4 million. What we teach in the Accelerator is how to build content that does both. The largest hotel account on Instagram and a 14-follower glamping camp near Bryson City are running the same principles. Scale changes the volume. The principles stay constant. Read more: How to turn followers into guests THE PROOFFour properties. Here’s what applying the same principles produced:
A property with 14 followers and a property with 2.4 million. A 130-room Hyatt and a safari tent near Bryson City. All four applied the same principles consistently. Property type, size, market, budget, price point, brand: nothing else matched across the four. THE TAKEAWAYStop waiting for the *perfect* case study.
Every property is different.
But the principles work for them all.
Ben Wolff Founder, Oasi & Modern Hospitality Accelerator |
Ben Wolff | The Unique Stays Guy
I build & manage unique hotels with the highest returns in hospitality. Learn how to grow your vision and go from commodity STRs to boutique hotels.
Modern Hospitality Playbook: How a viral post shrinks your booking window (and the real-time pricing move that turns the surge into ADR.) You post a reel. It takes off. The views climb, the saves stack up, and it feels like the marketing finally worked. Most of us screenshot it, drop it in the team chat, and get back to the day. Here's what that reaction misses. A viral post does something to your calendar before it ever shows up in your revenue. One reel at one of our properties pulled 1.7M...
Modern Hospitality Playbook: The anatomy of an Instagram carousel that gets swiped all the way to your booking link (and the one slide that does most of the work). I often hear you guys say carousels feel like busywork. You spend an afternoon in Canva, post a tidy set of slides, and it lands with a couple hundred views and zero bookings. So you quietly decide carousels don't work for hotels. Here's the thing. The carousel probably wasn't the problem. The way it was built was. A carousel isn't...
Modern Hospitality Playbook: How to create content that books rooms (even when nobody comes to your town) I often hear you guys tell me the same thing about content: my town isn't a destination. Nobody's heard of it. Nobody's booking a trip to see it. They come for the quiet, the view, a few days off the grid, and then they go home. So when you sit down to post, it feels like there's nothing to say. Onera Wimberley sits in a Hill Country town most people outside Texas have never heard of. But...