Why I built Stride Zero Marketing around profitable demand, stronger direct channels and clearer positioning
By Harjas Singh, Founder of Stride Zero Marketing
Hospitality taught me something that marketing dashboards often fail to capture: a hotel does not succeed because it generates more clicks. It succeeds when the right guests choose it, book through the right channels, spend with confidence and leave believing that the experience justified the price. That belief became the foundation of Stride Zero Marketing.
Learning hospitality from the inside
My relationship with hospitality began long before I considered building an agency. I studied International Hotel and Resort Management in the United Kingdom and went on to work inside hospitality operations across the UK and France.
Working closely with guests gave me a perspective that is difficult to obtain from a marketing dashboard alone. I saw how every promise made by a hotel brand was ultimately tested in real-world experiences: at reception, during an event, in a restaurant, and throughout a guest’s stay. A beautiful campaign could create attention, but operations still had to deliver the promise. The opposite was equally true.
A hotel could offer an exceptional experience and remain commercially invisible if its positioning, website or distribution strategy failed to communicate why it deserved to be chosen. That tension stayed with me.
Why do some distinctive hotels struggle to translate their quality into stronger commercial performance while less differentiated properties dominate digital visibility?
Over time, I realised that the answer was rarely a single marketing problem. More often, it was a disconnect among brand, distribution, acquisition, conversion and revenue strategy.
From service delivery to commercial strategy
When I moved to France, I continued my education in marketing and commercial strategy, with a particular focus on luxury tourism and business innovation. It changed the way I looked at hospitality.
Hotels were investing in websites, advertising, social media and search visibility. Revenue teams were managing rates, inventory and channel mix. Brand teams were shaping perception. Agencies were reporting traffic, impressions and engagement.
Yet these activities were often treated as separate disciplines.
A campaign could generate traffic without generating profitable bookings.
A visually impressive website could lose the guest at the moment of conversion.
A revenue strategy could protect the average daily rate while overlooking the cost of acquiring the booking.
And a hotel could celebrate high occupancy while remaining heavily dependent on expensive third-party distribution.
The industry had no shortage of data.
What it often lacked was commercial alignment.
The question behind Stride Zero
I founded Stride Zero Marketing in 2024 around one question:
What changes when hotel marketing is evaluated not only by visibility, but by its contribution to profitable revenue?
Like many young businesses, Stride Zero began broadly.
We worked across websites, content, search and digital execution. That early period was valuable because it revealed both what we could do and the limitations of remaining a generalist agency.
The decisive shift came when I returned to the industry I understood most deeply: hospitality.
Stride Zero evolved into a boutique growth agency focused on premium and independent hotels, built around three connected disciplines:
Revenue intelligence. Premium positioning. Digital execution.
Revenue intelligence asks whether demand is being acquired profitably.
Premium positioning asks whether a property’s identity, experience and offer give guests a compelling reason to choose it.
Digital execution turns that strategy into discoverability, conversion and effective customer acquisition.
The important point is that none of these disciplines works particularly well in isolation.
Direct booking is not an anti-OTA argument
One of the most persistent misunderstandings in hotel marketing is that increasing direct bookings means rejecting online travel agencies.
That is not the philosophy behind Stride Zero.
OTAs offer enormous value. They provide distribution, visibility, convenience and access to demand that many independent hotels would struggle to generate on their own.
The commercial problem begins when distribution becomes dependency.
Two bookings with the same room rate can create very different financial outcomes once commissions, advertising expenditure, discounts, technology costs and payment expenses are considered.
That is why looking only at topline performance can provide an incomplete picture.
RevPAR remains an important hotel metric, but commercial decisions increasingly require a wider view: net revenue, acquisition costs and the profitability of different channels also matter.
The objective should not simply be to generate more direct traffic.
It should be to create a healthier channel mix in which the hotel’s own website and digital ecosystem become productive commercial assets alongside external distribution partners.
Premium positioning must have commercial consequences
Luxury is sometimes reduced to an aesthetic language: elegant typography, restrained colours, cinematic photography and carefully chosen words.
Those elements matter.
But premium positioning must do more than look premium.
It should help a prospective guest understand why this particular property deserves to be chosen.
For an independent hotel, the greatest competitive advantage may not be scale.
It may be specificity.
A neighbourhood.
A history.
A particular design philosophy.
A culinary identity.
A distinctive approach to hospitality.
Or simply a way of making guests feel that can’t be easily replicated by a larger competitor.
When that specificity is translated into compelling offers, persuasive content and a coherent booking journey, brand strategy stops being purely aesthetic.
It becomes a commercial instrument.
Hotel discovery is entering a new environment
The way travellers discover hotels is also beginning to change.
Traditional search engines, social media and booking platforms remain central to travel discovery, but AI assistants are becoming another interface through which travellers can explore destinations and accommodation.
Instead of searching only for “luxury hotel Paris,” a traveller can ask for something far more contextual:
A romantic boutique hotel in Paris with a strong local identity.
A design-led property close to a business district.
A quiet luxury hotel suited to a particular type of trip.
This creates an important challenge for hotels.
They increasingly need to be understandable not only to potential guests and traditional search engines, but also to digital systems attempting to interpret what makes one property relevant to a particular traveller.
Clear positioning, credible editorial content, consistent information and technically sound digital infrastructure therefore become even more valuable.
AI does not remove the fundamentals of hospitality marketing.
If anything, it reinforces them.
A brand that cannot clearly explain what makes it distinctive becomes harder for both humans and machines to understand.
Building a different kind of agency
Stride Zero is still being built.
I do not see that as something to hide.
Being early forces us to remain close to first principles and to ask a simple question about every service we offer:
What commercial problem are we actually solving?
We are not trying to become the largest agency in hospitality.
The ambition is to become a rigorous strategic partner for premium and independent hotels that want their brand, distribution and digital investment to operate as one commercial system.
That philosophy also inspired The Revenue Review, our editorial series examining questions around hotel profitability, channel economics, positioning, digital acquisition and AI-driven discovery.
The objective is not adding more noise to an already crowded industry.
It is better to ask questions about how hotels create, capture and retain value.
Where hospitality goes next
My journey from hotel operations to entrepreneurship has convinced me of one thing:
The future of hospitality will not be shaped by technology alone.
It will be shaped by businesses capable of combining technology with commercial judgement and a genuine understanding of the guest experience.
Technology can improve discovery.
Data can improve decisions.
AI can accelerate execution.
But hospitality ultimately remains a human business.
The strongest hotels will be those that use these tools without allowing them to dilute what made the property worth choosing in the first place.
Stride Zero Marketing was created to work at that intersection.
Our mission is straightforward: to help distinctive hotels become easier to discover, more compelling to book and more profitable to grow—without losing the character that made them distinctive in the first place.
About the author
Harjas Singh is the founder of Stride Zero Marketing, a boutique growth agency focused on revenue-aligned digital growth for premium and independent hotels. His background spans hospitality operations in the United Kingdom and France, marketing and commercial strategy, and business education. He is also the creator of The Revenue Review, an editorial series exploring hotel profitability, distribution, positioning and the changing digital discovery landscape.
