Hiring a hotel marketing agency: questions, account ownership and the contract

A hotel marketing agency runs campaigns the hotel cannot staff itself, but the hotel must own the assets: domain, website, ad accounts, analytics, social profiles and guest data. Separate the agency fee from the media budget, measure the agency on confirmed bookings and net revenue, and write ownership, notice and handover into the contract.

A year into the retainer, the owner asks for the ad account and finds it in the agency's name. The campaigns, the audiences and the conversion history are all there, but the login is not, and the renewal is six weeks away. This article gives you the questions to ask before signing, the assets that must stay in the hotel's name, how to read a monthly report, and the contract clauses that make leaving possible without losing your history.

Do you need a hotel marketing agency, and what should stay in the hotel?#

An agency earns its fee on a defined, repeatable job the hotel cannot staff or measure itself. The assets and the data stay with the hotel whether or not an agency is involved.

Write the job down before you talk to anyone: paid search, social content, email, search engine optimization, or the whole calendar. One page of scope beats a pitch deck, because it is the only thing you can later compare delivery against. If you have not written that page yet, start with a hotel marketing plan on one page.

Then name what never leaves the hotel: the domain and its DNS records, the website hosting and content management account, the Google Business Profile, the analytics property, the ad accounts, the social profiles, the guest database and the reservation system. What the agency legitimately runs day to day is different: campaign builds, creative production, budget pacing, keyword and audience work, landing page copy, and the monthly report.

Apply the staffing test. If nobody inside the hotel can read a report, question a number and approve a budget change, an agency will not fix that. Someone internal must own the number the agency is judged on. Consider a project instead of a retainer when the need is one-off: a technical clean-up, one seasonal campaign, a rebuilt email flow. Projects end cleanly and cost less to exit.

Weigh the exit cost before you weigh the pitch. If leaving means losing the conversion history, the audiences and the login, the real price of the contract is the rebuild, not the monthly fee.

What should you ask a hotel marketing agency before signing?#

Ask about access, measurement and exit before you ask about creative. The answers tell you whether the relationship can be ended without losing the hotel's own history.

Ask which accounts they will create and in whose name. The correct answer is the hotel's name, with the agency added as a user or partner. Ask who does the work after month one, and whether the person in the pitch stays on the account; ask to meet the person who will actually build the campaigns. Ask how a booking is counted, which attribution window they use, and how they avoid counting the same reservation twice.

Ask what comes back if you leave: campaign history, keyword lists, creative files, landing page source, audience lists and the analytics property. Ask for the exact lines of the monthly report in advance, and for one real report with the client's figures removed. Ask what is excluded from the fee: photography, video, translation, landing pages, software subscriptions, and the platforms' own charges.

Ask for two references you can call, and one former client who left. Then ask that client what the handover was like. Treat any published ranking of agencies as an opinion until you can see the method behind it. Owners search for the best hotel SEO agency; nobody can verify a superlative, so ask for scope, references and access terms instead.

Who owns the ad account, the analytics and the domain?#

The hotel must hold owner-level access on every asset; the agency works as an invited user that can be removed in one click. Anything less hands the hotel's history to a supplier.

Ad accounts should be created under the hotel's own business identity, with the agency added as a partner or user. An agency-owned account keeps the conversion history, the audiences and the pixel data behind when the relationship ends. The same logic applies to the analytics property and the tag manager container: losing them means losing year-on-year comparisons, which is the only way to judge next year's work.

The domain is registered in the hotel's name, with a hotel email address on the record and the renewal card under hotel control. The linked article on hotel website security and ownership: domain, certificate and logins covers this in detail. On the website itself, the hotel holds the top-level administrator and the agency gets an editor role, with export rights written down. On social profiles, the hotel holds the page owner and the recovery email and phone number, because ownership disputes on a profile can take weeks to resolve. The Google Business Profile is verified under the hotel with the agency as a manager; it is the asset most often forgotten and the one that decides local search visibility.

The reservation system, the booking engine and the guest database are never handed over. The agency may read what it needs through a named user, and the export right stays with the hotel.

What is the fee, and what is the media budget?#

Two numbers, two invoices. The fee pays for work; the media budget is the hotel's money spent on platforms and should be visible line by line.

Keep the media budget in the hotel's own ad account with the hotel's payment method. The agency spends it, the hotel sees it, and the platform's own invoice is the proof. If the agency pays the platforms and re-invoices the hotel, require either the platform invoices or read-only access to the account so spend can be checked against the report.

Understand what each fee model rewards. A fixed monthly fee rewards scope discipline; a share of media spend rewards a larger budget; a project fee rewards a clean finish. Pick the one that matches the behavior you want. Ask in writing whether the agency receives anything from a supplier, network or tool for the spend or the subscription; an undisclosed rebate is a hidden discount on the hotel's own budget.

Decide who can raise a daily budget and up to what amount without approval. Campaigns move faster than approval chains, and an unapproved budget change can be a surprise on the first invoice. For the campaign side itself, the starter plan for how to advertise a hotel with Google and Instagram ads shows what the budget is actually buying.

What should a monthly agency report show?#

A report should end in confirmed bookings and net revenue the hotel can reconcile against its own system, with the cost of each booking next to it.

Report the whole chain, step by step: impressions, clicks, sessions, booking engine starts, confirmed bookings, net revenue after commission and discount. The step where the numbers collapse tells you where the problem is. The agency's booking count must match the hotel's own reservations for the same period, minus cancellations, or the report is describing a different business.

Show cost per booking and net revenue per booking, not cost per click alone. A cheap click that never reaches the booking engine is the most expensive line in the report. Split brand search from non-brand search: brand campaigns collect demand the hotel already had, and mixing the two makes every campaign look successful. The report should state the attribution window and the model, and say what is not counted; a report that does not name its own limits cannot be checked.

Do not accept reach, impressions, follower count or engagement rate as the headline. They can move in the right direction while bookings do not move at all. To compare what each channel actually leaves in the hotel, use the distribution cost per booking method.

What belongs in the contract: term, notice, data and handover?#

The contract fixes the term, the notice period, the list of assets, the data that comes back and what happens in the final month. Everything else is a preference; these five are protection.

Term and renewal: the initial term, whether it renews automatically, and the exact date and form by which it must be stopped. A renewal clause nobody diarized is how a one-year contract becomes three. Notice and wind-down: a notice period long enough to hand over, and a defined final month in which the agency still works, still reports and still transfers access.

An ownership clause lists each asset by name, with the obligation to transfer owner access to the hotel within a stated number of days after termination. A data clause covers campaign history where the platform allows an export, keyword lists, creative files, landing page source, audience lists, the analytics property and any guest list the agency touched. An access clause obliges the agency to remove its own users and confirm in writing, and the hotel to change every password it shared; removal, not just resignation, is the obligation.

Do not accept ranking or revenue guarantees. If there is a performance target, define the measurement source, the period and the remedy in the same paragraph, so the argument later is about facts. Guest data is personal data under KVKK (the personal data protection law), so the agency acts as a data processor: it needs a written undertaking, a retention period and a deletion obligation. Confirm the wording with a legal adviser. The same clauses from the software side, including exit and data return, are covered in hotel software contracts: clauses to read before you sign.

What to do next#

Before the next renewal date, ask the agency for a written access list covering every asset in this article, with the owner named for each one. That single document turns the rest of the checklist into a decision: what stays, what changes, and whether the contract needs amending before it renews.