Case study · Azzurro Club Vacanze · Dec 2022 – Feb 2026
Hospitality · Paid media · CRM
Owning the direct channel of 13 hotels
After COVID the group needed its own booking channel instead of paying commission on most online sales. Direct online bookings went from 20% to 70% of revenue in two years. Five things did that work: advertising, email, content, influencer marketing and a national comedy programme. Each one has its own case study below.
In twenty seconds
- What I owned
- Paid acquisition, the CRM and email programme, content strategy, influencer marketing, and a four-edition live format.
- What I changed
- Moved demand off the OTAs, rebuilt the lifecycle around the booking window, and put a creator format in front of the funnel.
- What happened
- 20% → 70% of online revenue booked direct · €1.49 per lead over twelve weeks · 32.8M organic views.
- What I can't prove
- Channel attribution was not in place in 2023, so no single lever can claim the rise. Each change below sits in the quarter it landed — nothing more is claimed.
Context
Every booking made through an online travel agency costs the hotel a commission of roughly 15 to 20 percent. The direct channel has no commission, but it has to be built and fed: paid social to create demand, brand search so the intent already there is not bought by someone else, and email to bring back guests who had already stayed.
What I owned
A budget of roughly 200000€ a year across paid media, talent, agency fees and production, reallocated weekly between channels on the basis of what the reporting said. Five areas, one goal: make the hotel's own channel cheaper than the commission.
- Advertising — Meta and Google Ads, lead campaigns for the season, brand search so intent already in the market was not bought by an intermediary.
- Email marketing and CRM — reactivating a database of past guests before they booked again through a platform.
- Content strategy — the editorial product for 13 properties, built to sell stays rather than to fill a calendar.
- Influencer marketing — talent partnerships across properties and seasons.
- The comedy programme — four national editions, the cheapest reach the group ever bought.
Five areas, five case studies
Comedy Week
The programme that came out of this: four editions, 28 comedians, 47 collaborations, 32.8 million organic Instagram views with no paid amplification, on a dedicated budget of 40000€ per edition. That is 4.88€ per thousand views across the programme, and the seasonal split matters more than the average: summer editions delivered views at around 3€ per thousand, winter editions at over 12€.
Tracking it video by video is what turned it from a nice number into a decision: five videos out of 43 carried 63% of the reach, two creators produced 70% of it, and the act with the worst debut became the best performer of the programme. The full analysis is here →