ITB Berlin 2025: The rise of revenue marketing

What if your hotel could increase revenue by 15 percent without spending more on marketing or hiring additional staff?

At ITB Berlin 2025, Cloudbeds’ Amit Popat, Head of Machine Learning, and Nikhil Shah, Head of Data Science, introduced Revenue Marketing—a game-changing approach that unifies revenue management and marketing strategies through the power of causal AI.

By integrating these traditionally siloed disciplines, Revenue Marketing helps hotels optimize pricing and marketing actions as a single, holistic strategy—leading to smarter decisions, stronger performance, and higher profitability.

During their session, Amit and Nikhil demonstrated how Cloudbeds Intelligence is transforming hotel performance by predicting demand with unprecedented accuracy and automating real-time decision-making.

This article recaps their conversation and explores why Revenue Marketing is set to reshape the hospitality industry.

The challenge: Siloed teams are costing hotels

Today, hoteliers are expected to drive revenue, increase direct bookings, optimize marketing spend, and personalize guest experiences – all while managing lean teams. Historically, a major barrier to success is the traditional separation of revenue management and marketing teams, which often operate in silos with different goals. 

During the session, Amit asked the audience, “How many of you have seen revenue and marketing teams actually collaborate in the same office every day?” The response was telling—very few hands were raised.

This disconnect leads to missed revenue opportunities. Marketing teams might focus on maximizing return on ad spend, but if those bookings primarily fill high-demand nights, they do little to improve overall profitability. 

Meanwhile, revenue managers are focused on optimizing price and availability but may lack insights into how marketing campaigns impact demand patterns. 

As a result, decisions are made in isolation rather than part of a cohesive commercial strategy that considers both demand generation and revenue maximization.

By contrast, Revenue Marketing ensures that these strategies work together, aligning hotel pricing, demand forecasting, and marketing efforts in real-time to maximize total profitability.

Causal AI: Understanding the ‘why’ behind performance

Amit said, “Traditional revenue management is like looking at a photograph—it provides a snapshot of past performance but lacks insights into why certain trends occurred. Causal AI, by contrast, is like watching a movie, revealing the full chain of events leading to an outcome.”

Technology like Cloudbeds Intelligence, which processes four billion data points every hour, uses causal AI to map the cause-and-effect relationships influencing demand, revenue, and guest behavior. Unlike traditional models that rely on historical data, this approach predicts future market conditions and prescribes optimal actions. 

The Mercure Paddington case study

To illustrate the power of Revenue Marketing, Nikhil shared a case study from the Mercure London Paddington, which faced a common industry challenge:

The hotel expected a surge in bookings due to a major trade show, yet weekend pickup remained low. Revenue management had not adjusted rates since Friday, assuming demand would materialize. Marketing, meanwhile, responded with a generic email blast that failed to drive conversions.

With Cloudbeds Intelligence, the hotel received real-time, data-driven recommendations tailored to its specific situation. Instead of relying on static rate adjustments or broad marketing tactics, it deployed a more strategic approach:

• Retargeting website visitors with time-sensitive offers to create urgency.
• Targeting high-intent travelers arriving via Paddington train routes.
• Deploying perk-based promotions instead of generic rate cuts, offering early check-in, romance packages, and cultural experiences.

By implementing these targeted actions, Mercure Paddington achieved 93% occupancy, compared to 64% for competitors, and outperformed the market in RevPAR, earning £120 compared to the £79 average.

The key takeaway? Instead of relying on reactive decisions, the hotel anticipated market shifts, optimized pricing and marketing together, and maximized profitability.

Revenue marketing: Shifting the industry forward 

The future of hotel performance optimization is not just about smarter pricing or more effective marketing—it’s about bringing these two disciplines together through AI-powered intelligence. With Cloudbeds Intelligence, hotels can:

• Predict future demand with up to 95% accuracy.
• Automate rate and marketing recommendations that adapt in real time.
• Optimize profitability by ensuring pricing and demand generation strategies are aligned.

Cloudbeds Intelligence is not just another revenue management system. It is a unified commercial platform that enables hoteliers to make strategic, revenue-driving decisions with real-time intelligence.