Turn Down: 11 September 2025

At Punch, we don’t just know hospitality… we live and breathe it. That’s why we’re launching our “Turn Down” –  a sector round-up of the key insights, headlines, and hospitality trends that have captured our team’s attention.

Read on for key industry news and get in touch if there’s anything you’d like to discuss.

Hospitality 

• The largest OTAs have invested a combined $5.2 billion in marketing in the second quarter of 2025, with a shift in marketing strategy to focus more intensely on social in order to meet changing consumer behaviour. 

• Tech platforms DigitalGuest and Chicostay have merged to create a unified platform for covering the guest journey. They’re positioned as strategic partners for hotels, giving hotels access to a range of guest-facing capabilities such as checkouts, housekeeping, and communication. 

• OTAs now only generate 22% of hotel bookings, compared to 30% the previous year, as hotels continue to focus on increasing direct bookings. 

• A recent study predicts leisure travel spending will grow 8% YoY until 2029. The number of nights in a stay is predicted to grow more slowly than overall spending, so hotels need to focus on ancillary revenue 

AI 

• Cloudflare decides to block AI crawlers, citing the harm caused by data scraping. This is being seen as a catalyst for the travel industry to reconsider data management, to avoid rising infrastructure costs and decreased conversion rates. 

Marketing 

• A US district judge has ruled Google must begin sharing some data with competitors to avoid a monopoly over online travel. However, many key figures in the industry believe this isn’t going to be a major development due to AI and social media already challenging Google’s dominance. 

• Meta has changed its guidelines that suggested brands stick to no more than 6 ads per ad set. The current guidance is diversification. 

• Google has updated Google Business Profiles, adding a new section called ‘dedicated landing page’. Your Google Business link must follow stringent criteria for crawlability. Local businesses need to start reviewing the guidelines to ensure continued visibility and traffic to their sites. 

• Against the prevailing thought among SEO specialists, a director at Google Search has stated that ‘Good SEO is good GEO’. He also shared that Google AI overviews have led to a 10% increase in searches in the US and India. 

• TikTok has started developing a new way to post videos without them appearing directly in your feed or profile. It’s similar to Instagram’s trial reels. 

• Instagram reintroduced a way to pin your own comments on videos. 

• Instagram adds a message response tracker to professional profiles, allowing you to monitor and improve your response rate. 

• Meta shares their tips to maximise performance during the holiday season, including automating with Advantage+ campaigns, utilising Gen AI to create a diverse range of assets, and playing for Q5 and beyond when the audience is on high alert for self-care. 

• Data from Buffer suggested posting 2-5 times a week on LinkedIn is the sweet spot for reach and engagement.