What We Learned From Emailing Hotels About Guest Recommendations
Tispiti Blog. Made for everyone, curated by locals.
We wanted to see how hotels actually respond when someone writes in asking for local guest recommendations, so we emailed a mix of chains, boutiques, and independents with that exact question. We weren’t staying there – just curious travellers – and that context matters, but the purpose was simply to observe behaviour.
Across the replies, some clear patterns emerged. Here’s a quick, skimmable breakdown of the biggest insights.
Check out our full write-up on How Hotels Share Guest Recommendations in 2025
Intent But No Infrastructure
Across nearly every reply – from PDFs to redirects to handwritten lists – the pattern was the same: hotels want to help guests explore the neighbourhood. What they lack is a shared, up-to-date system that lets them do it easily and consistently.
A lot of teams are improvising with whatever’s at hand: an off-site link, a PDF someone made years ago, a flyer rack, or soundbites of personal knowledge.
Key Insight: Hospitality isn’t the problem. The absence of structure is.
Pre-Arrival Moments Are Still Treated as Optional
More than half of the hotels didn’t reply, which isn’t surprising. Pre-booking emails don’t always feel like something staff are expected to respond to, especially when the sender isn’t yet a guest. Those messages naturally end up low priority in a busy inbox.
Still, it’s a missed moment. A single helpful recommendation might be enough to influence someone’s choice.
Key Insight: “Guest experience” hasn’t expanded to cover the part where a guest is still deciding.
Hotels Routinely Hand Off the Guest Experience to External Platforms
Lots of hotels made a quick handoff. Instead of sharing their own guest recommendations, they pointed us to external sources – TripAdvisor, tourism board pages, Google Maps lists, even ChatGPT.
It comes from good intentions (“give them something”), but it removes the hotel’s voice from the touchpoint entirely.
Key Insight: Third-party redirects solve the moment but surrender the relationship.
Look at our Tipsiti vs. TripAdvisor comparison – see why Tipsiti is the best option for guest recommendations.
Analogue and Static Formats Still Dominate
Flyers, PDFs, and single-page website lists still make up a large share of what guests receive. These formats show effort – someone built them at some point – but most don’t evolve with the city, with the season, or with guest interests.
Key Insight: Hotels are trying to create owned content – but the tools they’re using are outdated or static.
The Most Human Replies Were the Best – and the Least Sustainable
A handful of staff wrote genuine, thoughtful recommendations by hand: personal picks, small descriptions, “if you like this, try that.” These were by far the most meaningful replies. But they’re also the least scalable – stuck in individual inboxes, never captured or reused, or lost if the person leaves the job.
Key Insight: The industry’s strongest asset is human local knowledge – but it doesn’t live in a shared location.
The Core Problem Is Systemic
Across the entire study, a consistent pattern kept showing up: teams are stretched, knowledge lives in silos, tools are outdated, and care is high but capacity is low. Which means hotels fall back on whatever form their current setup allows.
Key Insight: This isn’t about effort – it’s about structure, ownership, and the ability to keep local insight alive across touchpoints.
Closing Thought
Concierges once carried this work, but most hotels today don’t have one. Front desks do what they can with the tools they’ve inherited – flyers, old PDFs, scattered notes. The intention and hospitality are there. What’s missing is structure: a way for local knowledge to live somewhere where staff and guests can access it with ease.
