A 2012 Q&A with Brian Fitzgerald of O'Rourke Hospitality on hotel digital marketing — preserved for the historical record, with a 2026 view on what stayed true and what the AI era rewrote.
Editor's note (2026): This Q&A was conducted in August 2012 and captures a moment when hotel digital marketing was reorganizing around search, PPC, and the early social platforms. The Google "Traveler's Road to Decision" study Fitzgerald references — finding the average travel shopper used 10.2 information sources before booking — was state-of-the-art for the period. Fourteen years later, the number is higher, the source mix has shifted from search results to AI engine answers, and the "virtual lobby" Fitzgerald describes has migrated from the hotel website to the answer box itself. The Q&A is preserved below as a historical reference. The closing section reads it forward to 2026.
The Original 2012 Q&A
Everything-PR engaged with a number of key decision makers across PR, creative, journalism, and editorial. Marketing experts came up less often. In Brian Fitzgerald, we found one of the strongest voices in hotel digital marketing.
Travel and tourism is among the most dynamic categories in digital marketing. Fitzgerald — then VP of Digital Strategy at O'Rourke Hospitality Marketing — sat for a Q&A over a couple of days. The exchange is preserved below.
Fitzgerald was previously a web strategist at TIG Global and Marriott International, with deep expertise across PPC, SEO, social media, digital media, and measurement. O'Rourke Hospitality Marketing was founded by Tom and Sue O'Rourke in 2001 and at the time served as one of the new-breed integrated digital agencies focused on the hospitality category.
EPR: Jumping right in — as a digital marketing expert, can you give our readers some insight into how the balance of PPC, SEO, social media, and digital media stands for hospitality companies? Has the balance of focus changed in the last year?
Brian: Over the last couple of years Google has produced some studies they call Think With Google. One of these, the Traveler's Road to Decision, has a fascinating statistic — the average travel shopper uses 10.2 information sources before buying. What this means for hotel marketers is that you need to be everywhere. SEO, PPC, email marketing, display advertising, partner linking, social media, and more. This presents challenges on budget resources and human resources — how can you pay for all these efforts and who manages them?
In terms of prioritization, we have not seen many changes in the past year. Hotels are testing more in social media, display, and distribution channels like Groupon, but the core activities are still centered around hotel websites and search. Your hotel website is your "virtual lobby" — where consumers immediately form their first impressions. Search engines are not going anywhere. There are over 2 billion searches performed on Google each day. Marketing tactics like SEO and PPC will continue to be at the top of the priority list.
EPR: A lot has been said about the OTAs and their commission models. Do you see hoteliers leaning more toward different channels — PPC, free OTAs, and the like?
Brian: I think every hotel paying commissions to OTAs has thought about how to shift business to less-expensive channels. I don't know many hotels that have figured out exactly how to do it — easier said than done. Over the past year I have seen many hotels test the group-buy model, but most find the costs comparable to OTAs.
Your mention of PPC is valid. I would like to see more hotels look at Google as a distribution channel and manage PPC spend the way they manage inventory in every other distribution channel. PPC has a cost — but compared to OTA commissions, PPC is extremely cheap. Too many hotels set their PPC budget and that's it. If PPC produces the desired ROI, why wouldn't you continue to invest, capture as much demand as possible, and shift business from OTAs to direct?
EPR: Your business revolves around ROI for hoteliers. How much emphasis do clients put on analytics, conversion, and proving ROI?
Brian: It depends. Some clients are perfectly focused on ROI of marketing activities. Some are not focused at all — often because of discomfort with digital marketing or because they wear many hats. Other clients are too focused on ROI and can't see the forest for the trees.
In ROI calculation, the revenue figure is dictated by your web analytics package and how it is set up to attribute data. The most common attribution method is last click. For most hotels the majority of last-click activity happens on branded PPC, branded SEO, or website direct — because by the time the consumer is ready to book, they know the specific hotel, dates, and rate package. Other marketing activities that helped generate the booking don't get credit. The unbranded PPC ad clicked two weeks ago and the retargeting display ad clicked a week ago don't get an assist.
It is becoming harder to look at digital marketing channels in a silo. You must understand how they influence the overall consumer journey. Attribution modeling will improve over time.
EPR: Given that proving social media and PR ROI has been difficult, do you think companies are still willing to operate on a trust basis?
Brian: The problem I see with hotels and social media is a lack of strategy. Most hotels are running to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the channel du jour because there is lots of buzz. Hotels should be sitting down as a team and asking "what are we trying to accomplish through social media?" If a hotel answers "we want to generate direct revenue," they should not proceed further — they are not understanding social media correctly. More appropriate responses — provide customer service, extend our hotel's personality, leverage the audience to evolve our product.
EPR: Do hoteliers understand or misunderstand the digital space?
Brian: On average I would say hoteliers understand it. However, as soon as they understand it, something changes. So it is something that must constantly be kept up with.
EPR: If you had to name a single most crucial branding tool for a hotel, would it be a website, a social-media feed, or something else?
Brian: Let's define "branding." To me, branding is communicating the essence of your business and your value proposition while connecting with the consumer in an emotional way. Under that premise, your website is the most crucial branding tool. Through colors, imagery, taglines, logo, and more, you convey the important points of your business and connect with the customer.
Your website is your "virtual lobby." 20 years ago, if someone booked through a travel agent or directly, they would have little understanding of your brand. They would form their immediate opinion upon arrival. Nowadays, guests form these critical first impressions as your homepage loads in their web browser. Your website is the first — and potentially last — opportunity to create a great first impression.
EPR: Are bigger hospitality players disadvantaged because they react slowly to the market?
Brian: I'm not sure I agree. There are so many larger players that even within the segment, there are always early adopters. What can be perceived as slowness is really a better understanding of and adherence to prioritization. Big brands are better at quickly identifying things that might just be a fad and not a long-term opportunity. Larger players are often good at quietly using their scale to test things before deciding on whether they are worthy efforts across the portfolio.
EPR: Is there a "best advice" statement for any hotel owner?
Brian: Whether you've hired a marketing partner, an A/V partner, or a property-management system partner — make sure they are exactly that, a PARTNER. Someone that sticks with you through thick and thin and has the same passion for your industry and property as you do.
What Stayed True — A 2026 View
Fourteen years later, the channel mix has rebuilt itself almost entirely. The "virtual lobby" has moved from the hotel website to the AI engine answer box. The 10.2 information sources Fitzgerald cited have multiplied — and the source layer that matters most is no longer organic search results, but the editorial corpus the AI engines retrieve from. Five things from the 2012 conversation, however, stayed true.
• "You need to be everywhere." The principle is unchanged — the surfaces have. PPC and SEO are still required infrastructure. Social, email, partner linking, and creator content carry retrieval weight. AI engine visibility is now the surface that compounds across all of them.
• The attribution problem. Last-click attribution still under-credits the upper-funnel work — and the AI engine layer has made the attribution gap worse, not better. The brand-narrative content that earned the citation share three years ago gets zero credit when the booking comes through branded direct today.
• Social media without strategy fails. Hotels still confuse "presence" with "performance." The discipline Fitzgerald demanded in 2012 — define the objective before opening the channel — is the same discipline that separates citation-leading hotels from the rest in 2026.
• The "virtual lobby" idea is now the answer box. Fitzgerald's frame — the website as the first impression — applies cleanly to the AI engine answer. Guests form their first impression of a hotel from what ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews say about the brand. That impression is built years before the booking.
• Partner — not vendor. The relationship advice still holds. The hotel groups that built long-term, deep partnerships with their marketing, AI-visibility, and content operators are the ones that own citation share today.
The channels change. The discipline does not. The hotels that won in 2012 ran an integrated, measured, partnership-anchored operation — and the ones winning citation share in 2026 are running the same operation against new surfaces.
• The Luxury Hospitality AI Visibility Hub
• Hotels Citation Share Index 2026
• The Hotel Marketing Operating System
• How AI Is Reshaping Hotel Marketing
• How Luxury Hotels Get Inside the AI Answer Box
About Everything-PR
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
