Why hotel branding is the most underused revenue strategy in hospitality | with Tomas Bäcklund

Episode notes

In this episode of Hotel Moment, Dylan Cole, Managing Director EMEA at Revinate, sits down with Tomas Bäcklund, Chief Marketing Officer at Elite Hotels of Sweden, for a conversation that challenges some of the industry's most persistent assumptions about where revenue growth comes from. Tomas is not a career hotelier — he came from the creative agency world, was headhunted as a candidate for the CMO role at Elite Hotels, and pitched his way into the job with a 35-slide deck built over a weekend. That outsider perspective has defined his leadership: while most of the industry focuses on distribution and efficiency, Tomas has spent five years making the case that brand is the single most underinvested revenue lever in hospitality. What you'll learn: ● Brand is why Gucci charges 8,000% more than a basic t-shirt: Tomas uses the fashion industry's most familiar example to make a point the hotel industry consistently misses. The quality difference between a luxury brand and a generic product does not justify the price gap. Brand does. The same logic applies to ADR, and most hotels have not learned to use it.