A hotel never runs out of things to talk about. There is always a room, a menu, a treatment, an event or a new offer waiting for a place in the email. The difficult part is deciding what belongs together.
A useful newsletter makes that decision before anyone starts writing. It chooses one guest, one moment and one next step. Everything else becomes much easier once those three things are clear.
Begin with one guest
Try not to picture your whole mailing list. Picture one person. Perhaps it is a couple who stayed last autumn, a family looking at the school holidays or a local guest who knows the restaurant but has never spent the night.
Now finish this sentence in ordinary language:
We are writing to people who [have this in common], because [this matters now], and we would like them to [take this next step].
You do not need to show the sentence to the guest. It is there to help your team decide what to include. If a paragraph does not help that person take that step, save it for another email.
Choose one honest reason to write today
“We need more bookings in November” is a perfectly sensible business need, but it is not yet a reason for a guest to open an email.
Translate the hotel’s need into something the guest can recognise. A quiet weekend before December becomes busy. The first warm evenings on the terrace. Three days when the children are off school. A menu that will only be around for a few weeks.
The reason does not have to be dramatic. It just has to be true, timely and specific enough to make the email worth sending now rather than next month.
Personalisation is mostly choosing what to leave out
Adding a first name can be pleasant. It does not make an email personal on its own. Relevance comes from choosing the right story for the right people.
A returning spa guest, a family planning half-term and somebody who only visits your bar should not all receive the same invitation. Start with the small amount of information that genuinely changes the email:
- how the guest already knows the hotel;
- what they have shown an interest in;
- which season, place or occasion matters to them now;
- which language they would reasonably expect you to use.
Only use information you are entitled to use and would be comfortable explaining. If a piece of data does not change the story, the timing or the destination, you probably do not need it.
Build the email in the order your guest will meet it
Start with the subject and the preheader, the short line that appears beside it in the inbox. They work as a pair: the subject gives the reason to care; the preheader adds the detail that makes opening feel worthwhile.
Then write a short opening that keeps the same promise. Bring in something only your hotel can say: a particular view, dish, ritual, room or person. Let the guest picture what the visit might feel like.
A simple order is usually enough:
- Subject: the reason to pay attention now.
- Preheader: one useful detail the subject could not hold.
- Opening: two or three sentences that place the guest in the moment.
- Hotel proof: the rooms, food, people or experiences that make the promise real.
- Action: one clear next step.
Suppose you are writing to couples who stayed last autumn.
The moment is a quieter October weekend before the end-of-year rush.
The subject might be “October called. It prefers a long weekend.”
The email can then show the room, dinner downstairs and a late Sunday breakfast.
The main button should lead to the October stay you have just described.
Let the landing page finish the story
If the email promises a three-night autumn stay, the button should open the page where that stay is explained and can be booked. Sending the guest to the homepage makes them start the search again.
Read the email and landing page together. The wording does not need to be identical, but the guest should feel that the click took them to the next part of the same conversation.
Make it easy to read before you make it beautiful
Read the email once with the photographs turned off. The meaning, offer and next step should still be clear in the text. Photography can deepen the desire; it should not carry information the guest cannot find anywhere else.
Keep a useful plain-text version, write descriptive alt text for photographs that carry meaning and make the button understandable without relying on its colour. The booking page should still be the obvious next step when the email is read with images blocked.
Then read the real send on a phone. Use one vertical flow, comfortable text and enough contrast for the action to be obvious. Email clients are unpredictable, so check Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook rather than trusting the editor preview alone.
Take care of permission and delivery
Use a list of people who have asked to hear from you. An email address collected for a booking, a restaurant reservation or Wi-Fi access is not automatically permission for every kind of marketing.
Tell people what they are joining, keep the frequency recognisable and make leaving easy. The precise rules vary by market, so your privacy or legal team should confirm what applies to your properties.
Your sending setup matters too. Ask whoever manages your email to authenticate the sending domain using SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Keep marketing emails separate from booking messages and remove addresses that repeatedly fail.
Gmail treats more than 5,000 messages a day to personal Gmail accounts as bulk sending. Its current guidance is to keep the user-reported spam rate below 0.10% and never let it reach 0.30%. Bulk marketing messages also need one-click unsubscribe as well as a visible unsubscribe link in the email. Yahoo publishes similar authentication and unsubscribe requirements.
Measure what happened after the click
Open rate is now a limited signal. Apple Mail Privacy Protection downloads remote content in the background rather than waiting for somebody to view the message, and Google says it cannot verify the accuracy of open rates reported by other tools.
Look at the whole path instead: delivery, bounces, unsubscribes, spam complaints, useful clicks, booking-engine starts and bookings. Compare similar audiences and offers. Before the email goes out, decide how many days after a click you will still count a booking as connected to that send.
Be modest about what the numbers prove. A last-click booking does not mean the email caused the stay. It does tell you that the message helped somebody reach the booking path, which is already worth learning from.
A five-minute check before you send
- Can you describe the guest in one sentence?
- Is there a real reason for this email to arrive today?
- Does it contain something specific to your hotel?
- Is there one obvious action?
- Does the landing page continue the same promise?
- Can you understand it with the images turned off?
- Does the plain-text version still contain the reason and next step?
- Have you checked the real email on a phone?
- Do you have permission to send it, and can the guest leave easily?
If one answer is unclear, fix that before adding more copy. A shorter email with a clear reason is kinder to the guest and usually easier for the hotel to approve.
Sources and notes
The examples above also draw on an unpublished Lumina review of sixteen hospitality emails collected in August 2026. Reading them helped us notice structure and pacing. It was a small sample, so it cannot tell us which emails sold more rooms.