Hospitality, 2013–present. IT, marketing, and the website, as a department of one. Live.
Executive Inn & Suites and Bayside
I ran the websites and marketing for two Oakland hotels, helping guests find the properties and book directly.
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What happened.
2,000%+
more visitors from Google over six years, without paying for ads
Executive Inn & Suites, 2013–2019
~$1.5M
bookings from email in a single year
Executive Inn & Suites
9+ years
working with the same hotel owners
Executive Inn & Suites and Best Western Plus Bayside
- Paid search ads, Facebook and Instagram ads that follow up with past visitors and find people like them, text-message campaigns, and campaigns aimed at specific locations, all run in-house
- The photography and video on the current site, shot on the property by me
Where it started
Two independently owned hotels on the Oakland waterfront, one of them under a Best Western flag. In 2013 most of their bookings came through the online travel sites, and each of those bookings cost the hotel a commission. The hotel's own website, the one channel where a booking costs nothing extra, was maintained by whoever had time. I was hired to be the person who had time.
The job title said IT manager. In practice I ran the network, the property's marketing, the social accounts, the email program, and the website, and I did it alone for six and a half years. Whatever I didn't do didn't happen. I still work with the same owners today.
What made it hard
- I was the only person for every technical and marketing job across two properties. Anything that depended on someone remembering to do it eventually got skipped.
- Demand moved with the calendar. Conferences, games, and festivals filled the rooms, so the site needed pages for events that hadn't happened yet.
- The booking engine belonged to a vendor. Everything a guest saw before reaching it was mine to change, and everything after it was not.
- The paid budget was an independent hotel's paid budget. Search had to carry the property or nothing would.
What I built
Pages for the reasons guests actually come
Guests don't search for a hotel by name. They search for the neighborhood, the airport, parking, what's walkable from the estuary. I built pages that answered those searches, kept building them as the calendar turned, and measured bookings through the hotel's own site against bookings through the travel sites. The reasoning is simple. An ad stops working the day you stop paying for it, and a travel-site commission comes off every booking for as long as the room is listed. A page that ranks keeps working.
Emails sorted by why people came
A guest who came for a conference and a guest who came for a weekend are not the same person, and one monthly newsletter treats them as if they were. So the list was split by reason for stay, with offers to match. Prepaid rates for event planners. Member discounts for the retirees who book months ahead. One year of that produced around one and a half million dollars in bookings attributed to email.
Checks built into the tools instead of my memory
Being the only operator meant every mistake was mine and every check was also mine. So I moved the checks into the things I was already using. Email templates that couldn't go out without a rate filled in. Reports that ran on a schedule whether or not anyone asked for them. It's an unglamorous habit, and it's where the working method on the colophon started.
In 2026, a writing tool that won't export a broken email
In early 2026 I built the property an internal studio for its emails and blog posts. The marketing coordinator assembles a draft from ready-made sections, and before it can be exported the tool runs eight checks. A send date in the past, a subject line over sixty characters, a link with no tracked version in the library, all of it stops the export and says why. The coordinator doesn't have to remember any of it. Under the hood the drafts compile through MJML, an email layout language, so the same draft looks right in every mail client.
What isn't measured
- Growth percentages flatter small starting numbers, and the 2013 starting number was an independent hotel's. The ratio is real; the baseline was modest.
- No controlled test separates the email revenue from the seasonality it rode on. It's a figure attributed to email over one year, not a measured lift.
- The share of bookings coming direct versus through the travel sites was never kept as a running series, so I can't say how much of the search growth displaced commission.
- Google search impressions for the event pages have never been pulled from Search Console. That's on the owed list.
Built with
See for yourself
The current site, on Webflow, with photography and video from the property. The email and blog studio is an internal tool and has no public address.
Notes
The number people ask about is the email revenue, so here’s the shape of it. It wasn’t one campaign. It was a year of emails to groups of guests who already knew the hotel, each with an offer that made sense for them, tracked through the booking engine’s own attribution. What I took from it wasn’t that email works. It was that a list you’ve earned is worth more than any list you can buy, and the same is true of a search ranking.
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