The first assignment was not advertising. It was strategic marketing: a hotel on the main square of Oaxaca has the best location in the city and, for that very reason, has to protect how it is perceived. We built a positioning campaign so the hotel could speak again about what it was doing.
Once the relationship was built, the underlying problem surfaced, and it was about margin. More than sixty percent of bookings came through online agencies, and each one took its commission. The hotel filled rooms, but part of the money left before it ever reached the till.
There was also a hole in the schedule. From six in the evening to nine in the morning nobody was answering. Anyone asking about availability at midnight got no reply, and by breakfast they had booked somewhere else — usually through an OTA.
Where the project started
First, close the hole
We put an AI agent on WhatsApp to cover exactly those dead hours. Not to replace the front desk: so the two-in-the-morning booking would not go to an agency. The agent answers, pushes the hotel’s direct rate and leaves the details ready for the front desk to confirm in the morning.
In parallel we built the new website, with booking as the main action rather than a hidden button.
Then, measure the whole path
This is the work almost nobody in the local market actually delivers. The ad leaves tagged and the trail never breaks: it reaches the site or WhatsApp, and from there the booking or the conversation. Messenger comes in through the same channel. It all ends up organized in the CRM.
With that, every booking knows where it came from. Not by an ad platform’s estimate — by the hotel’s own record.
+56%
direct bookings from the website vs. the same period last year
−15%
dependence on OTAs
7
months to match the entire previous year
What comes next
The CRM that brings Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp into one place, with the service agent on top, is about to go in. Today conversations live separated by channel, and follow-up gets lost there.
The goal for the year is to two-and-a-half times the current pace of direct bookings. It is not a comfortable target, but for the first time it can be chased with numbers in view instead of intuition.
And that is the pattern that repeats: the agent and the website were not the goal. They were the consequence of first understanding where the margin was going.
Figures published as percentages by agreement with the client. The commercial model of the project is not disclosed.