Obvlo for Hotels: The Smarter Way for Independent Hotel Groups to Win on Content
Running a group of independent hotels means doing more with less. Less budget, less headcount, less time — but the same expectation from guests to find rich, useful, up-to-date content about every single one of your properties.
You're not a global chain with a dedicated content team and a seven-figure marketing budget. You're a group of 5, 10, maybe 20 properties with a lean team that's already stretched across campaigns, rate management, reputation, and everything in between. Content — real, deep, location-specific destination content — keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list.
Meanwhile, OTAs are investing millions into exactly that content. And every booking that goes through Booking.com or Expedia instead of your website costs you 15–25% in commission before you've done a thing.
Obvlo exists to close that gap — without the agency fees, the content backlog, or the full-time hire.
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The Problem Independent Hotel Groups Know Too Well
Here's the uncomfortable truth about destination content: the hotels that do it well win. More direct bookings, better SEO rankings, higher guest satisfaction, stronger loyalty. The research is clear and the logic is simple — guests who plan their trip on your website book on your website.
But for an independent hotel group, building that content the traditional way is almost impossible to justify.
A single comprehensive destination guide from a quality content agency costs $500–$1,500. A full set of local area pages — enough to capture the long-tail search traffic your properties deserve — can run $15,000–$50,000 per property. Multiply that across your portfolio and you're looking at a content investment that no lean marketing team can realistically approve, let alone execute and maintain.
So most independent groups do what they can. A generic "Things to Do" page. A paragraph borrowed from the local tourism board. Maybe a blog post that was last updated in 2022. It keeps the page from being completely empty, but it doesn't compete — not with OTAs, and not with AI search tools that are increasingly shaping how travellers discover where to stay.
The result is a content gap that costs real money. Every guest who can't find what they need on your website goes back to Booking.com. Every booking that goes through an OTA instead of directly costs you 15–25% commission. For a 10-property group processing 20,000 room nights per year at an average rate of $180, that commission exposure runs into seven figures. Every year.
The problem isn't that destination content doesn't work. The problem is that doing it properly — across multiple properties, kept current, genuinely useful — has always been out of reach for groups at your scale. Until now.
Is This You?
Obvlo is built for independent hotel groups that are serious about growing their direct channel but don't have the resources to build a content operation from scratch.
You're probably running somewhere between 5 and 50 properties. Your hotels have personality — boutique, lifestyle, regional, or brand-defined — and the location experience is a genuine part of what guests are buying. Your marketing team is small, capable, and perpetually pulled in too many directions. You know you should be doing more with content. You just haven't found a way to make it scale.
If you're a large global chain with dedicated content studios and regional marketing teams, Obvlo isn't your solution. But if you're the group that's competed hard on service and product while watching OTAs out-content you on your own destination — this was built for you.
What Obvlo Does for Hotel Groups
Obvlo's AI can curate exactly what a guest needs for a specific trip, rather than just assuming what they want
Jonathon Liu | Chief Commercial Officer, Verdi Hotels
Obvlo is an AI-powered content platform built specifically for the hospitality industry. It creates high-quality, property-specific destination content at scale — the kind of content that ranks on Google, gets referenced by AI search tools, keeps guests on your website longer, and ultimately converts more of them into direct bookings.
The important distinction: this isn't a generic AI writing tool with a hotel template bolted on. Obvlo is trained on hospitality content, understands the guest journey, and generates content anchored to the exact location of each of your properties — not city-level overviews that could describe any hotel in the area.
For a hotel group, that specificity is everything. A neighbourhood guide for your Edinburgh property is different from the one for your Glasgow property, which is different again from your property in the Cotswolds. Obvlo builds that distinction into every piece of content it creates, pulling from verified local data sources — mapping APIs, event calendars, tourism databases — to ensure what's published is accurate, relevant, and genuinely useful to a guest planning their stay.
And because content goes out of date — restaurants close, attractions change hours, new venues open — Obvlo monitors for those changes and flags updates automatically. Your destination content doesn't degrade quietly while your team is focused on other things. It stays current.
What Obvlo Creates Across Your Portfolio
The content Obvlo generates for hotel groups isn't limited to one format or one purpose. It's a connected content ecosystem that serves guests at every stage of the planning journey and creates multiple entry points into your website from search.
Destination and neighbourhood guides are the anchor. Rich, property-specific content that captures what makes the area around each of your hotels special — the character of the neighbourhood, what's within walking distance, how the local landscape changes by season. This is the content that keeps potential guests on your site instead of clicking back to an OTA.
"Things to do" pages organised by traveller type — families, couples, solo travellers, business guests — give different audience segments a reason to engage. A couple researching an anniversary weekend needs different content from a family planning a half-term break. Obvlo creates both, without your team writing either.
Local dining and restaurant recommendations position each of your properties as the local expert. Not a generic roundup scraped from TripAdvisor, but curated, location-aware recommendations with context — the kind of insider knowledge guests used to have to ask the front desk for.
Local area and "hotels near" pages are the SEO engine of your content strategy. Each of your properties has opportunities to rank for dozens of long-tail search queries — "hotels near [landmark]," "where to stay in [neighbourhood]," "best hotels close to [attraction]." Without these pages, you're invisible for all of them. Obvlo creates them at scale, with the quality and specificity that actually ranks.
Personalised pre-arrival content takes destination content beyond the website. When guests receive pre-arrival communications that reflect their booking context — a family itinerary for the school-holiday booking, romantic restaurant suggestions for the anniversary stay — they arrive better prepared, more excited, and already associating that value with your hotel, not the OTA they originally booked through.
Seasonal and event-based content keeps each property's website fresh throughout the year without constant manual effort. Summer hiking trails, winter markets, local festivals, sporting events — Obvlo keeps this content current so you don't have to.
The Business Case: What This Is Actually Worth
An engagement rate uplift of over 3x and a conversion rate uplift of over 5x.
Content isn't a cost centre. For hotel groups that do it properly, it's one of the highest-returning investments in the business. Here's what the numbers look like.
SiteMinder's 2026 booking data shows that direct bookings through hotel websites generate an average of $516 per reservation, compared to $312 through OTAs. That $204 gap reflects the absence of commission fees, but also the higher-value bookings that direct channels attract — guests who book longer stays, choose premium rooms, and add ancillary spend.
To put that in practical terms: a 10-property group processing 2,000 room nights per year per property, with 40% of bookings currently going through OTAs at a 20% commission rate, is paying roughly $288,000 annually in OTA commissions across the portfolio. Shifting just 10% of those bookings to direct — a conservative outcome from a proper content strategy — saves approximately $28,800 per year in commissions alone. Shift 25%, and you're looking at $72,000 back in the business.
The content investment that drives that shift costs a fraction of those savings. Hotels implementing AI-powered destination content typically see a positive return within 60–90 days, with SEO benefits compounding over the following 6–12 months as pages index, rank, and attract increasing organic traffic.
It's all about engagement, which is a pre-cursor to revenue. Engaged users convert at a much higher rate than non-engaged users. So if you can move website traffic that you already have from the 'unenegaged' bucket into the 'enbaged' bucket, you will convert more and increase profits.
Obvlo has validated this with real customer data. Across a group of 10 hotels in the UK, engagement rates, conversion rates, and average booking value are all significantly higher when website visitors are exposed to Obvlo content.
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Over 90 days, average website users had an engagement rate of 9.75% while for Obvlo exposed users it was 32.23% - an engagement rate uplift of over 3x.The total purchase rate was 4.37%, while for those engaged by Obvlo, it was 21.3% - a conversion rate uplift of over 5x. We can directly correlate the increased conversion rate with Obvlo’s impact on engagement.
The comparison with traditional agency content is equally stark. An agency building out comprehensive destination content for a 10-property portfolio might charge $20,000–$50,000 per property — $200,000–$500,000 total — with ongoing maintenance fees on top. Obvlo delivers equivalent coverage at a fraction of that cost, across your entire portfolio, with automated maintenance included.
There's also a less obvious but significant benefit: what your team does with the time they're not spending on content. For a small marketing team managing multiple properties, reclaiming 15–20 hours per week from content creation and maintenance means more capacity for strategy, campaigns, and the revenue-driving work that actually requires human judgment.
How It Works
Getting started with Obvlo is designed to be straightforward, even for a team without a dedicated content or technical resource.
Onboarding begins with a simple property intake: your portfolio details, brand guidelines, tone of voice preferences, and content priorities. Obvlo maps each property's exact location and identifies the content opportunities — which pages to build, which keywords to target, which traveller segments to address.
Content generation follows. Obvlo's AI builds property-specific destination content for each of your hotels, pulling from verified local data sources and applying your brand voice throughout. You're not getting templated content with the property name swapped in — you're getting location-specific writing that reflects the genuine character of each of your destinations.
Review and approval puts your team in control. Nothing goes live without your sign-off. Content is presented for review, and your team can edit, refine, or redirect before anything is published. The AI does the heavy lifting; you make the final call.
Publish and maintain is where the compounding begins. Once content is live across your properties, Obvlo monitors for changes — venues closing, hours updating, new attractions opening — and flags what needs refreshing. Your destination content stays current without requiring a quarterly audit from your team.
How Obvlo Works Across the Full Guest Journey
Most content tools solve one problem. Obvlo is different because destination content touches every stage of the guest relationship — from the first search to the fifth stay.
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Attract. The guest journey starts with a search your hotel isn't showing up for. "Boutique hotel near the Cotswolds." "Things to do in Edinburgh's New Town." Every Obvlo destination guide, neighbourhood page, and local area article is a new organic entry point into your website — content that ranks on Google and gets referenced by AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Unlike paid ads, it compounds in value over time.
Engage and convert. Getting visitors to your site is only half the job. Keeping them there — and giving them a reason to book direct rather than returning to an OTA — is where destination content earns its keep. When a potential guest can plan their entire trip on your website, they book on your website. Obvlo's personalisation layer sharpens this further: a couple sees romantic dining options, a family sees kid-friendly activities, a business traveller sees efficient restaurants and quiet workspaces. The right content for the right guest converts at significantly higher rates than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Delight. The same content that drives SEO and conversions extends naturally into the stay itself. Personalised pre-arrival emails, in-room digital guides, and concierge recommendations — all powered by Obvlo's location-specific content — give guests the insider knowledge they'd otherwise have to ask the front desk for. Guests who arrive better informed leave better reviews, make more use of hotel facilities, and associate that value with your hotel, not the OTA they booked through.
Retain. Every content interaction — the destination pages visited, the pre-arrival guide opened, the restaurant recommendations clicked — generates preference signals that no OTA will ever share with you. Over time, that first-party data becomes the foundation of a re-marketing strategy that actually works: past guests reached with offers and content that reflect what you already know about them, driving repeat direct bookings at a fraction of the original acquisition cost.
Common Questions from Hotel Groups
"Will the content feel generic across all our properties?"
This is the right question, and it's why Obvlo was built differently from generic AI writing tools. Every piece of content is anchored to the specific coordinates of your property, pulling from local data sources that are unique to each location. A guide for your coastal property in Cornwall is built around what's actually near that hotel — the beaches, the restaurants, the walking routes — not a generic coastal destination template. Brand voice training ensures the content reads consistently with how your group communicates, across all properties.
"How do we know the local information is accurate?"
Obvlo pulls from verified data sources — mapping APIs, official tourism databases, event platforms — rather than generating information from scratch. Every piece of content goes through your team's review before it's published, and the platform monitors live data to flag changes like closures or updated hours. You maintain editorial control throughout.
"Our team is already stretched. Won't this create more work?"
The honest answer is that Obvlo is designed to reduce your team's content workload, not add to it. The research, drafting, structuring, and maintenance that currently consume hours of content work are handled by the platform. Your team's role becomes review and approval — a fraction of the time required to create content from scratch.
"What about Google and AI content quality concerns?"
Google's guidelines are clear: they don't penalise AI-generated content — they penalise low-quality content, regardless of how it's produced. Obvlo creates content that is helpful, accurate, location-specific, and user-focused — which is exactly what Google (and AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity) reward. Hotels using Obvlo see improved search rankings and AI search visibility, not penalties.
The Broader Picture: Content in the Age of AI Search
There's one more dimension worth understanding, because it's reshaping hotel distribution faster than most marketing teams have had time to respond to.
Generative AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overview — are rapidly becoming mainstream trip-planning channels. Deloitte's 2026 travel outlook found that generative AI use for travel research has tripled since 2023. When a traveller asks one of these tools where to stay in your destination, the AI pulls from whatever detailed, authoritative, helpful content it can find. If your website has the richest destination content in your area, you get recommended. If it doesn't, your competitors do.
This emerging discipline — Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO — is still in its early stages, which means the first-mover advantage for hotels that invest now is significant. Independent hotel groups that build comprehensive, location-specific destination content today are positioning themselves not just for stronger Google rankings in 2026, but for AI search visibility in 2027 and beyond.
Obvlo content is built with this in mind. The depth, specificity, and structured format of Obvlo-generated destination content is designed to perform in both traditional search and AI search environments — giving your properties visibility wherever your potential guests are looking.
What Independent Hotel Groups Gain With Obvlo
The compounding effect of a proper content strategy across your portfolio is hard to overstate. Each of these outcomes builds on the last.
More destination content means more organic search entry points per property. More organic traffic means more opportunities to convert visitors into direct bookers. A higher direct booking rate means lower average acquisition costs across the portfolio. Lower acquisition costs mean more margin to reinvest in guest experience and marketing. Better guest experience means stronger reviews, more loyalty, and more repeat direct bookings. The cycle continues.
The hotels that are winning on direct bookings in 2026 aren't spending more on paid advertising. They're building content assets that compound in value over time — driving traffic, converting guests, and reducing OTA dependency without requiring continuous spend to sustain the results.
For an independent hotel group, that's the most efficient use of a constrained marketing budget: invest once in content that keeps working, keeps ranking, and keeps converting long after the initial effort.
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Ready to See What Obvlo Can Do Across Your Portfolio?
The content gap between your hotel group and the OTAs isn't inevitable. It's a solvable problem — and the solution doesn't require a content agency retainer, a new hire, or months of internal resource.
Obvlo was built for groups like yours: independent, quality-focused, and serious about growing the direct channel without the costs that have historically made comprehensive content feel out of reach.
If you're managing 5 properties or 50, we'd like to show you what Obvlo looks like across your specific portfolio — the content opportunities at each location, the search traffic you're currently missing, and what a realistic direct booking impact looks like over 6–12 months.
Or explore more on the Obvlo blog: AI Content for Hotels: The Complete Guide | Destination Content for Hotels | How to Increase Direct Bookings
Obvlo helps independent hotel groups create high-quality, property-specific destination content at scale — driving more direct bookings, reducing OTA dependency, and building long-term search visibility across every property in your portfolio.
