Email marketing is still doing the heavy lifting for hotels, resorts and destination marketers in 2024, whether the algorithms of the day want to admit it or not. Revinate’s “The State of Email Marketing in North America 2024” confirms what many of us in the trenches already suspected: the inbox remains one of the most reliable channels a hospitality brand owns outright, immune to the next platform pivot or feed shake-up. Here are five takeaways from that study, filtered through a travel and hospitality lens.
1. Email Still Matters — Maybe More Than Ever
72% of consumers say they prefer to hear from brands by email. — Revinate, Hospitality Benchmark Report 2024
Social media gets the spotlight, but email keeps quietly converting. Guests appreciate the convenience of a message that waits for them rather than scrolling past in three seconds, and they are far more likely to actually read what lands in their inbox than what floats through a feed.
The study found that Millennials — those 25 to 40 year old travellers hotels and tour operators are constantly chasing — favour email at an even higher rate, 80%. That should give pause to any property or DMO that has quietly let its newsletter program go stale in favour of chasing Instagram Reels.
2. Personalization Is No Longer Optional
64% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that sends personalized emails. — Revinate, Hospitality Benchmark Report 2024
Travellers expect messages that reflect where they’ve been and where they’re likely headed next, not a generic blast to the entire database. Brands that personalize see the payoff directly in engagement and bookings.
One hotel chain cited in the study saw a 25% jump in open rates simply by adding the guest’s name and recommendations based on their past search behaviour. Not exactly rocket science, but it still separates the properties that are paying attention from the ones sending the same email to everyone on the list.
3. Automation Does the Heavy Lifting
Automated emails generate three times more conversions than non-automated ones. — Revinate, Hospitality Benchmark Report 2024
Automation frees hospitality marketers from manually triggering welcome messages, abandoned-booking reminders, or post-stay upsells. Set it up once, and the right message reaches the right traveller at the right moment in their journey — pre-arrival, mid-stay, or well after checkout.
The study puts adoption at 75% of surveyed businesses already using automation for their email marketing. That number feels high compared to what I actually see on the ground with hotels and inns I work with here in Quebec — either the industry is further ahead than I think, or a lot of properties are quietly overstating how “automated” their workflows really are.
4. Mobile Is Where Your Guests Are Reading
60% of consumers check their email on a smartphone. — Revinate, Hospitality Benchmark Report 2024
Travellers are often reading hotel and destination emails between flights, in an airport lounge, or on a trail somewhere with two bars of signal. That means responsive design isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s table stakes. Build for the phone first, keep the layout clean, and don’t bury the offer under three paragraphs of scroll.
5. AI Is Opening a New Chapter
AI can boost email open rates by 20%. — Revinate, Hospitality Benchmark Report 2024
AI is reshaping how hospitality brands segment their lists, sharpen subject lines, and time their sends. Platforms like Mailchimp have already folded these capabilities directly into their tools, helping draft subject lines and newsletter content while also flagging the optimal send window for a given segment. For a destination or hotel group managing dozens of campaigns a year, that kind of assist adds up fast.
The Bottom Line
Email marketing remains a foundational tool for any hospitality brand looking to build lasting relationships with travellers, not just chase a single booking. A few other points worth keeping in mind from the Revinate data: transactional emails, like booking confirmations and pre-arrival details, are the messages travellers actually look forward to opening; promotional sends still convert best when timed around a traveller’s own booking window rather than a generic calendar push; and performance should be tracked and adjusted continuously rather than reviewed once a quarter.
Get personalization, automation, mobile design and a bit of AI assistance working together, and email stops being an afterthought wedged between social posts. It becomes what it has quietly been all along for hospitality brands: one of the highest-return channels in the marketing mix.
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