Hospitality and Tourism Marketing

Course Description

HFT2500 – Hospitality and Tourism Marketing is a 3-credit course applying marketing to hotels, restaurants, attractions, events, and destinations. Institutions title it variously — Hospitality and Tourism Marketing (UCF), Hospitality Marketing (Polk, Daytona State), and simply Marketing within the hospitality prefix (Broward).

Hospitality marketing differs from product marketing in ways the course takes seriously. The product is a service — intangible, produced and consumed simultaneously, inseparable from the people delivering it, and impossible to inventory. A hotel room unsold tonight is revenue that can never be recovered, which is why revenue management occupies a place here that it does not in general marketing. And the customer's experience is the product, which makes operations and marketing far less separable than in most industries.

Content covers the services marketing framework — intangibility, perishability, inseparability, and variability, and the extended marketing mix that addresses them; market segmentation and targeting in hospitality; positioning and branding; consumer behavior and the travel decision process; marketing research; product and service design; pricing and revenue management — demand forecasting, rate strategy, and yield; distribution channels — direct booking, online travel agencies, global distribution systems, and the economics of intermediation; promotion — advertising, sales, public relations, and digital and social media; online reputation — reviews, ratings, and response; loyalty programs and relationship marketing; destination marketing; and sales for group and corporate business.

Offered at approximately 12 Florida institutions with hospitality programs.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe how services marketing differs from product marketing and the implications for hospitality.
• Apply the extended services marketing mix including people, process, and physical evidence.
• Segment a hospitality market and select target segments with justification.
• Develop a positioning statement and describe how brand supports it.
• Describe the travel decision process and factors influencing hospitality purchases.
• Design and conduct basic marketing research and interpret the findings.
• Analyze competitors and identify points of differentiation.
• Apply pricing strategies appropriate to a hospitality operation.
• Explain revenue management and calculate key metrics including RevPAR, ADR, and occupancy.
• Evaluate distribution channels and describe the cost and control trade-offs of each.
• Describe the role of online travel agencies and the economics of commission and rate parity.
• Develop an integrated promotional plan within a defined budget.
• Develop a digital and social media marketing approach for a hospitality business.
• Describe online reputation management and craft appropriate responses to reviews.
• Evaluate loyalty program design and its effect on retention and profitability.
• Describe destination marketing organizations and their role.
• Describe the group and corporate sales process.
• Prepare a marketing plan for a hospitality or tourism business.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe sustainable and responsible tourism marketing.
• Describe crisis communication and recovery marketing.
• Describe international and cross-cultural hospitality marketing.
• Describe marketing analytics and performance measurement.
• Describe influencer and content marketing in travel.
• Describe marketing for restaurants and food service specifically.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Services marketing — the four service characteristics and their consequences.
• The extended marketing mix — product, price, place, promotion, people, process, physical evidence.
• Marketing environment — economic, social, technological, and competitive forces in travel.
• Segmentation and targeting — leisure, business, group, and niche segments.
• Positioning and branding — brand equity, brand standards, and franchising.
• Consumer behavior — motivation, decision process, and post-purchase evaluation.
• Marketing research — methods, data sources, and interpretation.
• Pricing — strategies, discounting, and rate structures.
• Revenue management — forecasting, inventory control, RevPAR, ADR, and occupancy.
• Distribution — direct, OTA, GDS, wholesalers, and channel cost analysis.
• Advertising and promotion — media selection, messaging, and budgeting.
• Digital marketing — websites, search, email, and social platforms.
• Online reputation — review platforms, ratings, and response practice.
• Public relations — media relations and publicity.
• Loyalty and relationship marketing — program design and customer lifetime value.
• Personal selling — group, corporate, and event sales.
• Destination marketing — DMOs, convention and visitors bureaus, and funding.
• Marketing plan — the integrated written deliverable.

Optional Topics

• Sustainable and responsible tourism marketing.
• Crisis communication and recovery.
• International and cross-cultural marketing.
• Marketing analytics.
• Influencer and content marketing.
• Restaurant and food service marketing.

Resources & Tools

• Marketing for Hospitality and Tourism (Kotler, Bowen, Makens & Baloglu), Pearson — the standard text in the field.
• Hospitality Marketing Management (Reid & Bojanic), Wiley.
• STR — the source of RevPAR, ADR, and occupancy benchmarking data the industry runs on; many programs have educational access.
• VISIT FLORIDA — the state destination marketing organization; publishes visitor volume, spending, and origin research, all free and directly usable in assignments.
• County tourist development councils and CVBs — Visit Orlando, Greater Miami CVB, Visit Tampa Bay, and every other Florida county; publish local visitor data and marketing plans.
• Google Analytics and Google Business Profile — free, and the practical tools for the digital unit.
• TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, and Yelp — live material for the reputation management work.
• HSMAI — Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International; student membership and certification.

Career Pathways

• Hotel Sales Manager and Director of Sales — the most direct destination.
• Revenue Manager — analytical, well compensated, and in persistent demand.
• Marketing Manager (SOC 11-2021) — hotels, restaurant groups, and attractions.
• Digital Marketing and Social Media Manager — where most entry-level hiring occurs.
• Destination Marketing Organization staff — Florida's CVBs and tourist development councils.
• Catering and Event Sales Manager — connects to HFT2750C The Event Industry.
• Meeting, Convention, and Event Planner (SOC 13-1121).
• E-commerce and Distribution Analyst — managing OTA and direct channel mix.

Special Information

Florida is the case study — and the data is public

Tourism is among Florida's largest industries, and the marketing infrastructure supporting it is unusually transparent, which makes this course concrete in a way it is not elsewhere:

• VISIT FLORIDA is the statewide destination marketing organization and publishes visitor volume, spending, and origin-market research at no cost.
• Every Florida county funds destination marketing through the tourist development tax — the local option "bed tax" on short-term lodging, authorized by § 125.0104, F.S. Revenue goes to a tourist development council with statutorily limited permitted uses, largely promotion and tourism-related facilities. This is worth understanding precisely: it explains where destination marketing money comes from, why DMO budgets rise and fall with lodging demand, and why the permitted-use restrictions constrain what a CVB may spend on.
• Orlando is among the most visited destinations in the world and Miami a principal international gateway, so competitor analysis and positioning assignments can use real, well-documented markets.
• Seasonality is pronounced and regionally variable — South Florida peaks in winter, the Panhandle in summer — which makes demand forecasting and rate strategy genuinely interesting rather than theoretical.
• Hurricane season (June 1 – November 30) makes crisis communication and recovery marketing a standing Florida competency rather than an edge case.

Revenue management is the highest-value technical content

Because hotel rooms and airline seats are perishable, selling the right inventory at the right price at the right time is where hospitality profitability is decided. Students should leave able to calculate and interpret RevPAR (revenue per available room), ADR (average daily rate), and occupancy, and to explain the trade-off between them — raising rate lowers occupancy, and which combination maximizes revenue is an empirical question, not a preference. Revenue management is also one of the better-paid hospitality career tracks and is less physically demanding than operations, which matters for long-term career planning in this industry.

Distribution economics is the industry's live commercial argument

Online travel agencies deliver bookings a property might not otherwise get, and take a substantial commission for each. Direct booking costs less but requires the property to generate its own demand. The resulting tension — channel mix, rate parity, loyalty-member direct rates, and the cost per acquisition of each channel — is a genuine strategic problem that hospitality managers argue about continuously. Students who understand the arithmetic can contribute to that conversation immediately.

Online reputation is operations, not just marketing

Review scores measurably affect bookings and pricing power, and they are produced by service delivery rather than by advertising. That makes reputation management the clearest illustration of the course's underlying point: in hospitality, marketing cannot be separated from operations, because the experience is the product. Responding to reviews well — promptly, specifically, without defensiveness, and to the future reader rather than the reviewer — is a concrete skill worth practicing.

Course numbering and level

The course appears as HFT2500 under several titles. It is a 2000-level lower-division course and does not satisfy upper-division marketing requirements in a bachelor's program; MAR3023 (Principles of Marketing) and upper-division hospitality marketing courses are different numbers at a different level. SCNS equivalency applies to the same number at the same level, never across numbers. It sits alongside HFT2750C The Event Industry in a hospitality curriculum.