Life in hospitality and travel is a constant balancing act. You’re not just chasing bookings, you’re protecting market share in a competitive market where guest loyalty can shift overnight.
Most hotels and tour operators barely retain 55% of their guests, compared to 75% across other industries. That gap represents a massive opportunity for improving customer satisfaction and reducing customer churn.
Even small retention wins matter: increasing guest retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25–95%. That’s the kind of lift that transforms both occupancy rates and return on investment.
In the hospitality and travel industry, your market presence is built (or broken) on customer experience. Guests aren’t just buying a room or a seat. They’re buying product experiences that align with their needs at every stage of the journey.
That’s where a lifecycle marketing maturity model comes in.
It’s the blueprint for moving guests from first awareness to long-term loyalty while keeping churn rate low and protecting your market position.
By the end of this guide, you’ll walk away with how to:
- Speak the language of marketing maturity models, tailored to hospitality & travel.
- Navigate the five lifecycle stages with confidence, from concept through reinvention.
- Move from “one-size-fits-all” to stage-specific, ROI-boosting tactics.
- Stay leagues ahead using real market insights and competitive intelligence.
P.S. Ready to turn guest loyalty into your competitive advantage? inBeat Agency helps hospitality and travel brands move from one-time bookings to repeat stays with targeted, data-driven campaigns that boost retention and ROI. Book a free strategy call and start building a guest lifecycle strategy that works.
TL;DR:
Guest retention in hospitality and travel lags behind other industries (55% vs 75%), but even a 5% improvement can lift profits by 25-95%.
A lifecycle marketing maturity model helps brands move guests from awareness to loyalty by aligning customer experience, technology, processes, data, and strategy.
Five lifecycle stages:
- Development: Test concepts with pilots and gather feedback before scaling.
Introduction: Build awareness and trust with storytelling, influencers, and direct booking incentives. - Growth: Personalize experiences, automate upsells, and track service quality while scaling.
- Maturity: Defend market share with loyalty programs, yield management, and seasonal campaign refreshes.
- Decline or Reinvention: Rebrand, retarget new demographics, or pivot to restore demand.
Stage-specific strategies strengthen market presence, improve customer satisfaction, and protect ROI.
Ongoing practices like monitoring trends, acting on feedback, and tracking competitors keep products relevant and reduce churn.
Strong guest relationships, predictive analytics, and proactive customer support are essential for long-term retention.
Brands that consistently audit their lifecycle marketing model every 6-12 months adapt faster and hold loyal niches in competitive markets.
What Is the Marketing Maturity Model in Hospitality and Travel
Consider a marketing maturity model as your GPS. It shows you where you are, where you can go next, and which capabilities you need to build to win more market share in a competitive market.
In hospitality, the most effective models are grounded in customer experience.
They help you shift from ad-hoc campaigns to coordinated, insight-driven programs that boost customer satisfaction across every guest touchpoint.
One example is Virtusa’s Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM³). This one benchmarks performance across five enablers: customer experience, technology, processes, data, and strategy. It also ranks maturity levels from novice to integrated.
Another is the Travel & Hospitality Digital Experience Maturity Model (DXMM). This model scores brands on pillars like content, personalization, journey orchestration, and decisioning, based on data from over 700 global brands.
The benefit?
A maturity model aligns marketing strategy, distribution channels, and CRM systems to strengthen your market presence.
You’ll be able to time upsells with precision, deliver consistent product experiences, and demonstrate measurable impact on occupancy rates, loyalty, and return on investment.
Insider tip: Create a “Guest Readiness Index” to self-score on data unification, personalization cadence, automation, and measurement clarity. This quickly reveals whether your next investment should be in a loyalty program, product development stage innovations, or advanced analytics. Brands that do this tend to hold onto a loyal market niche even during challenging economic cycles.
Key Stages of the Product Life Cycle
The five stages of the product’s lifecycle are development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline (or reinvention). In hospitality and travel, each stage comes with unique signals, challenges, and risks. All these can shape your market position and influence long-term customer satisfaction.
Knowing which stage you’re in is the fastest way to focus your efforts, control costs, and protect guest relationships. Here’s how to spot them.
Development Stage
The product development stage is where new hotel packages, airline routes, or cruise itineraries are conceptualized and tested.
Signs you’re here:
- The viable product exists mainly as a concept or is in a limited pilot.
- Revenue is minimal or non-existent, usually leading to minimal profits at this point.
- Heavy focus on research, feedback loops, and early product experiences.
Challenges:
- High uncertainty around demand forecasting (STR).
- Risk of over-investment before validation.
- Limited guest data to guide decisions in this product development stage.
Example: WhyHotel’s Pop-Up Pilot
In 2017, WhyHotel tested a bold new hospitality concept: turning unused units in brand-new, not-yet-leased luxury apartment buildings into temporary, fully licensed hotels.
Their first pilot ran for about five months at The Bartlett in Washington, D.C. They offered 50 units with hotel-style service, daily cleaning, and access to rooftop terraces, pools, and other amenities.
At this stage, the business model was still unproven. Guest demand, operational costs, and scalability were unknowns. The pilot allowed WhyHotel to:
- Validate the concept in a real market without committing to a permanent location.
- Gather guest feedback on the “home-sharing comfort meets hotel consistency” experience.
- Test operational workflows, from staffing to 24/7 guest support, before expanding.
Following the pilot’s success, WhyHotel secured $4 million in seed funding and opened a second pop-up in Baltimore with 158 apartments, marking the transition toward the Introduction Stage. That brings us to the next point:
Introduction Stage
In the introduction phase, businesses launch the new product to the single market or target audience they’ve identified. This is where storytelling, branding, and distribution channels are critical to build initial adoption.
Signs you’re here:
- The product or service is launched in a single market or targeted region.
- Bookings come mainly from early adopters and brand enthusiasts.
- Awareness is still low in the broader target audience.
Challenges:
- Building trust quickly to compete for market share.
- High marketing spend without immediate ROI.
- Adjusting service delivery in real time to maintain customer satisfaction.
Example: In early 2025, Etihad Airways introduced its updated Business Studio cabin on select Boeing 787-9 routes from North America to Abu Dhabi. This single market debut was aimed at building early adoption before global rollout.
Growth Stage
The growth phase is marked by increasing market share, stronger product experiences, and expanded reach.
Signs you’re here:
- Strong demand and rising occupancy or bookings signal the growth stage.
- Customer base expands beyond early adopters.
- Repeat bookings increase, increasing your customer satisfaction scores.
Challenges:
- Maintaining service quality at scale in a competitive market.
- Fending off new entrants who want your market share.
- Managing distribution channels to optimize yield.
Example: In 2025, Radisson Hotel Group expanded aggressively in India by opening five new hotels and adding 940 rooms across four major markets. This expansion advanced their market presence, broadened their distribution channels, and reinforced their market share.
Maturity Stage
Here, competition intensifies, and maintaining market position becomes the priority.
Signs you’re here:
- Growth has plateaued, but market presence is strong.
- Competitors offer similar product experiences.
- Loyalty programs are a primary defense for retaining market share.
Challenges:
- Price wars and promotional fatigue.
- Rising acquisition costs relative to retention costs.
- Keeping customers happy in an environment where guest expectations evolve rapidly.
Example: In 2024, hotel loyalty memberships across major brands grew 14.5%, with members booking 52.8% of occupied rooms. This was a key driver in defending market share and sustaining customer satisfaction in saturated markets.
Decline or Reinvention Stage
Decline happens when interest wanes, competition overtakes, or market trends shift. This often leads to a rising churn rate.
Signs you’re here:
- Bookings and engagement are declining despite active promotions.
- Guest reviews indicate shifting demand, lowering your Customer Effort Score.
- Churn rate is climbing, eroding your market presence.
Challenges:
- Deciding whether to pivot, rebrand, or retire the offering.
- Balancing reinvestment with expected return on investment.
- Targeting new segments without alienating existing customers.
Example: In 2024, Singapore’s Hotel Traveltine completed a full digital transformation after rebranding. The results included a 217% increase in website traffic, a 17% rise in direct bookings, and a 23% boost in GDS revenue. That’s compared to the same period in 2023, so we can say the hotel successfully restored its market presence.
Marketing Strategies for Each Stage of the Product Life Cycle
The best strategies for each stage of the product lifecycle in hospitality and travel are tailored to your current market position, the maturity of your product experiences, and the expectations of your target audience. Aligning the right actions with the right stage to protect market share, strengthen customer satisfaction, and increase return on investment.
Development Stage: Launch Smarter by Testing Early
Decisions made during the product development stage directly impact future profitability and your ability to capture a loyal market niche.
Key strategies:
- Run soft launches in a single market to validate demand before scaling.
- Collect feedback with tools like Qualtrics and Typeform to refine the viable product.
- Use waitlists and pre-sale offers to gauge interest without risking minimal profits from premature rollouts.
Example: In 2018, Marriott piloted its home‑rental concept, Tribute Portfolio Homes, in London (single‑market test), then expanded to additional European cities after positive feedback. In April 2019, it launched Homes & Villas by Marriott International with 2,000+ homes in 100+ markets.
Introduction Stage: Build Awareness and Early Trust
A strong debut sets the tone for your growth phase. Missed opportunities here can lead to a higher churn rate later.
Key strategies:
- Partner with DMOs and micro-influencers to accelerate market presence.
- Use OTAs for reach, but offer direct-booking perks to improve customer satisfaction.
- Leverage immersive content (virtual tours, influencer walkthroughs) to boost trust.
The 2025 Influencer Travel Study by TravelBoom Marketing found that 28% of travelers booked a hotel based on influencer recommendations. This proves that influencer partnerships can enhance market presence, build early trust, and drive bookings during a launch phase.
Example: Let’s imagine Airbnb is developing a new “Local Host Video Tours” feature that would let guests preview a stay through a short, personality-driven video shot by the host. Since this idea is still in the development stage, they come to inBeat to validate whether it’s worth scaling.
Our creative strategy in this scenario:
- Micro-influencer seeding: We’d select 20 travel and lifestyle creators who already use Airbnb and have strong storytelling skills, giving them early access to the feature.
- UGC format testing: We’d experiment with TikTok-style clips, Instagram Stories, and YouTube Shorts to see which styles drive the most engagement and booking intent.
- A/B listing tests: Half of these creators’ listings would go live with video tours, half without, so we could directly measure the feature’s impact.
By the end of this imaginary campaign, Airbnb would have real-world creative insights and data to decide if the feature deserves a global launch.
Growth Stage: Personalize and Scale
The growth stage is your window to expand market share and secure a loyal market niche before competitors crowd the space.
Key strategies:
- Segment travelers by purpose and tailor experiences accordingly.
- Automate upsell and loyalty offers via Salesforce Hospitality Cloud or Braze.
- Track Customer Effort Score to ensure service quality keeps pace with booking growth.
Example: In 2024, Turtle Bay Resort leveraged Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform to deliver personalized guest communications across web, email, and social channels. This resulted in a 40% uplift in conversion rates, including double-digit gains through advanced segmentation and journey optimization.
And we helped Hopper, a leading travel app, sustain rapid growth on TikTok by solving one of their biggest scaling challenges: ad fatigue.
As their top creatives began to lose traction and CPAs climbed, we built a scalable UGC content creation process. That means we connected Hopper with top-performing creators who could consistently deliver fresh, high-converting ads.
This approach kept their campaigns performing at peak efficiency. Besides, it lowered acquisition costs, and maintained strong audience engagement while they expanded their market share.
Maturity Stage: Defend Your Position and Margins
In the maturity stage, holding market position is just as critical as gaining new guests, and retaining a loyal market niche becomes the driver of profitability.
Key strategies:
- Deploy yield-management systems like Duetto to optimize rates without eroding customer satisfaction.
- Refresh campaigns seasonally to maintain market presence.
- Offer VIP exclusives for top-tier loyalty members to deepen engagement.
Example: In 2024, Jannah Hotels & Resorts in the UAE used Duetto’s RMS to shift from manual pricing to automation. That’s how they achieved a 22% increase in Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) and a 34% rise in Average Daily Rates (ADR). Even better, they reduced manual tasks, so they could defend margin and loyalty.
Decline or Reinvention Stage: Pivot With Purpose
Decline signals the need for bold moves, either revitalizing product experiences or reallocating resources to protect return on investment.
Key strategies:
- Retarget emerging demographics or travel trends to rebuild market presence.
- Rebrand or bundle services to create new value.
- Exit low-performing segments to focus on high-yield opportunities.
Example: In 2024, independent hosts using the platform Hospitable achieved a 571% surge in direct bookings, with total direct-booking revenue soaring to $28.7 million. This illustrates a dramatic reinvention away from dependence on online travel agencies and reclaiming market control.
Leverage Marketing Insights for Product Longevity
Longevity comes from continuously aligning product experiences with what guests want before your competitors do. Here’s how to stay ahead:
Identify Market Trends
Brands that track shifts like sustainable tourism, digital concierge services, and AI itinerary planning are more likely to hold market position in a growth phase.
Example: Hotels adopting digital concierge tools, like Hilton’s Digital Key, saw a 7% RevPAR lift on average.
Customer Feedback and Adaptation
Collecting guest feedback is not enough. You must use it to raise customer satisfaction and reduce customer churn. Tools like Medallia and ReviewPro centralize reviews from all distribution channels, making it easier to pinpoint and fix friction points.
Competitive Analysis
Competitive intelligence reveals gaps you can close before rivals capture your loyal market niche. By tracking competitors’ offerings, pricing trends, guest reviews, and marketing campaigns, you can spot emerging threats and opportunities early.
This insight lets you refine your positioning, strengthen your unique value proposition, and respond to market shifts faster. That’s how you turn potential losses into strategic wins.
Example: Competing with Marriott Through Competitive Intelligence
You’re a boutique hotel chain in London, preparing to compete with Marriott. Using competitive intelligence, we spot openings you can capitalize on before they do.
From public data, we see Marriott’s central London properties pushing “Stay Longer, Save More” packages.
Next up, guest reviews praise the scenery and dining but note slow service responses.
Also, their latest campaigns lean on emotional, aspirational imagery, like “Where Can We Take You?”
Besides, they have heavy investment in streaming, airport OOH, and print.
Here’s how we’d respond:
- Value differentiator: Launch a “London Fringe Getaway” at £400/night, spotlighting authentic neighborhoods, local markets, and indie galleries.
- Service advantage: Offer 24/7 concierge via WhatsApp, positioning your hotel as fast, personal, and tech-friendly. Plus, you’re directly addressing Marriott’s service lag.
- Creative strategy: Borrow Marriott’s emotional tone but localize it. Use warm, lifestyle-driven visuals of real London experiences to connect on a personal level.
Enhance Customer Satisfaction Throughout the Cycle
Customer satisfaction in hospitality and travel is the ability to meet or exceed guest expectations at every lifecycle stage. Do it right and you’ll be impacting market share, market position, and overall profitability.
Brands that excel in this area keep customer churn low and hold onto a loyal market niche even in a competitive market.
Build Strong Customer Relationships
Strong relationships improve retention and protect market share during both growth stage expansion and maturity.
To achieve this at scale, use platforms like Salesforce Hospitality Cloud and Oracle OPERA. They integrate guest profiles across distribution channels to ensure a consistent customer experience.
Adapt to Evolving Consumer Needs
Agility in responding to shifts in demand keeps customer satisfaction high and supports long-term market presence.
Predictive analytics platforms like Amperity identify changes in booking patterns. We advise you to use a tool like this to adjust product experiences before the churn rate rises.
Provide Excellent Customer Support
Fast, multilingual, and proactive service safeguards customer satisfaction and reduces customer churn. So, offer round-the-clock support via phone, messaging apps, or AI chatbots. That’s how you ensure a frictionless customer experience, no matter your growth phase.
Final Thoughts: Optimizing Lifecycle Marketing in Hospitality and Travel
Mastering the lifecycle marketing maturity model means more than knowing the five stages. It requires aligning each stage with the guest journey to protect market share, grow market presence, and deliver an exceptional customer experience.
In a competitive market, the brands that thrive keep customer satisfaction at the center of their strategy. They measure it consistently, adapt product experiences quickly, and treat lifecycle marketing as a living framework. Also, this metric gets reviewed every 6–12 months for maximum return on investment.
Insider tip: Audit your lifecycle marketing model with cross-department input, including marketing, sales, operations, and guest services. You’ll spot opportunities that siloed teams miss, from optimizing distribution channels to introducing product experiences that fit a specific growth phase.
Even small changes, like re-timing campaigns based on booking data or reducing Customer Effort Score in mobile apps, can cut customer churn and defend a loyal market niche. In this way, your brand stays ahead, year after year.
Ready to put these strategies into action? Partner with inBeat to craft high-performing campaigns at every stage of your growth. Book a call today and discover how we can help your hospitality or travel brand scale smarter.
FAQ
1. What is the life cycle concept of marketing?
The life cycle concept of marketing refers to the stages a customer goes through in their relationship with a brand. These range from awareness and consideration to purchase, retention, and advocacy. Each stage requires tailored messaging and tactics to keep customers engaged and moving forward in the journey.
2. What is the difference between CRM and lifecycle marketing?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) focuses on storing and managing customer data, while customer lifecycle marketing (CLM) uses that data to create targeted campaigns for each stage of the customer journey. In short, CRM is the tool, and lifecycle marketing is the strategy.
3. What is lifecycle marketing vs product marketing?
Lifecycle marketing focuses on the customer journey, while product marketing focuses on positioning and promoting a specific product or service. The two work together, but they have different priorities and metrics.
4. How does inBeat help travel and hospitality brands with lifecycle marketing?
inBeat connects brands with top-performing creators, paid media campaigns, SEO, and email marketing tailored to each stage of the customer journey. We build scalable creative strategies that drive engagement, bookings, and long-term loyalty.
