Index: The Citation Share Index · EPR Travel & Hospitality Pillar · Updated September 2026
The travel CMO title is being rewritten in real time. Chief Customer Officer. Chief Commercial Officer. Chief Advertising Officer. Chief Digital and Marketing Officer. Sometimes no C-suite marketing title at all. The function is the same. The brief is not.
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01Peggy Roe EVP & Chief Customer Officer Marriott International
Oversees brand, marketing, design, data, and Marriott Bonvoy (228M+ members) across 30+ brands. Bonvoy's loyalty footprint compounds across nearly every traveler-intent prompt the engines answer.
Score94 -
02Mark Weinstein CMO & Head of Luxury Brands Hilton
Architect of "Hilton. For the Stay." and Hilton Honors (226M+ members). Combined CMO + luxury portfolio role is the most-cited brand-builder configuration in the index.
Score91 -
03Mark Vondrasek EVP & Chief Commercial Officer Hyatt Hotels Corporation
Unifies sales, marketing, World of Hyatt loyalty, digital, and guest experience. The structural template for the new travel CMO — sales-marketing-loyalty under one P&L.
Score82 -
04Heather Balsley Chief Commercial & Marketing Officer IHG Hotels & Resorts
Leads brand strategy, marketing, commercial performance, customer data, and end-to-end customer experience across IHG's 20 brands and IHG One Rewards. Took the role April 2024.
Score76 -
05Ranjan Goswami Chief Marketing and Product Officer Delta Air Lines
18-year Delta veteran. New role explicitly ties product (cabin, digital, amenities) to brand marketing — the most aggressive bet in the index on AI-era marketing structure. Incoming June 2026, succeeding Alicia Tillman.
Score73 -
06Caroline Clayton SVP Communications & Chief Marketing Officer American Airlines
Promoted into CMO role ahead of American's 2026 centennial. Marketing and corporate communications combined under one leader — a configuration the AI engines reward when reputation and brand citations align.
Score68 -
07Rebecca Van Dyck Chief Marketing Officer Airbnb
Joined July 2025 from Meta, Apple, and Levi's. Reports to Hiroki Asai, now Chief Experience Officer, in a split that separates brand-building from end-to-end product experience. Leads Airbnb's push beyond stays into travel services and experiences.
Score67 -
08Jochen Koedijk Chief Marketing Officer Expedia Group
Leads global marketing spanning brand, creative, loyalty, and marketing data science across Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo. In May 2026 his mandate expanded to absorb Expedia Group Advertising, unifying media and brand under one seat.
Score65 -
09Lee D. Applbaum Chief Marketing Officer Norwegian Cruise Line
Appointed June 2026, previously global CMO at Patrón Spirits and Bacardi (Tequila Patrón, Grey Goose), and CMO at Wheels Up. First cruise-industry role; joins as NCL has seven ships on order through 2037.
Score63 -
10Dara Brady Chief Marketing Officer Ryanair
Two decades at Ryanair; built the airline's irreverent, meme-driven, low-ad-spend social presence. Europe's most-talked-about carrier by that measure — a direct counterpoint to the loyalty-led U.S. model dominating the top of this index.
Score62 -
11Maggie Schmerin Chief Advertising Officer United Airlines
No CMO title at United. Schmerin holds advertising; loyalty sits with MileagePlus CEO Richard Nunn. Distinctive split — and the engines treat United's brand citation surface accordingly: stronger on cultural prompts, weaker on loyalty.
Score61 -
12Sabrina Callahan Chief Digital and Marketing Officer Southwest Airlines
First-ever CDMO at Southwest, appointed April 2026. Joined from Hilton. Mandate is to unify marketing and digital under one leader as Southwest expands into new markets.
Score57 -
13Kara Wallace Chief Marketing Officer Royal Caribbean International
Traditional CMO title; full marketing remit. Royal Caribbean's modeled citation share leads cruise category — and Wallace's portfolio shows in how consistently "Royal Caribbean" surfaces for "best cruise line" prompts across all five engines.
Score54 -
14Noha Abdalla Chief Marketing Officer Choice Hotels International
Leads marketing for Choice's franchise-driven, midscale-heavy portfolio (Comfort Inn, Quality Inn, Cambria). One of the few remaining hotel-sector leaders with an unambiguous, standalone CMO title.
Score52 -
15Matthew Dacey Chief Marketing Officer Tripadvisor
Leads marketing for the review-and-booking platform as it works alongside Viator's experiences pivot. Tripadvisor's citation surface skews heavily toward "best things to do" and destination-research prompts rather than direct booking.
Score51 -
16Scott Strickland Chief Commercial Officer Wyndham Hotels & Resorts
Moved from CIO to CCO in April 2024, absorbing marketing, sales, distribution, and Wyndham Rewards under one tech-forward commercial seat after CMO Lisa Checchio's departure. Wyndham's largest-by-property-count franchise model rewards direct-booking technology as much as brand marketing.
Score49 -
17Alexandra Withers Chief Commercial Officer, Fairmont & Raffles Accor
Joined Accor's luxury brands January 2026 from Highgate Hotels, where she led marketing. The chief commercial pattern at the brand-collection level — luxury portfolio marketing increasingly run as a P&L function, not a brand function.
Score48 -
18Amy Martin Ziegenfuss Chief Marketing Officer Six Flags Entertainment
Appointed June 2026 after leading marketing at Carnival Cruise Line and, earlier, Hilton's global enterprise brand team. Theme parks and cruise/hotel marketing are converging on the same executive talent pool — this is that pattern's clearest data point.
Score45 -
19Stephanie Evans Greene SVP, Marketing and Brand JetBlue Airways
No CMO title at JetBlue either — Greene leads advertising, product development, digital commerce, and brand strategy, reporting to JetBlue's president. Another data point for the index's core thesis: the title is fragmenting faster than the function.
Score42 -
20Eric Edge VP, Brand & Marketing Alaska Airlines
Leads brand and marketing for the combined Alaska-Hawaiian dual-brand model. Also no CMO title — marketing sits under the EVP & Chief Commercial Officer. The smallest standalone marketing organization in the index, closing it out at the opposite end from Marriott's 228M-member Bonvoy machine.
Score38
The CMO role in travel is being rebuilt — not eliminated. The function is broader than it has ever been. It absorbs sales (Hyatt, IHG, Accor, Wyndham), product (Delta), digital (Southwest), customer experience (Marriott, Airbnb), and communications (American). The narrower CMO of the 2010s — brand campaigns and media buying — is the exception, not the rule.
Three forces are driving the shift.
One. Loyalty is no longer a side program; it is the audience graph. Marriott Bonvoy has 228M members. Hilton Honors has 226M. The first-party data those programs generate is the only audience asset that survives the third-party cookie era and feeds AI personalization at scale. Marketing now reports to whoever owns the loyalty graph. Ryanair is the counter-case: virtually no loyalty program, and marketing built entirely around organic social distribution instead.
Two. The product is the marketing. Delta's restructure — combining marketing and product under one Chief Marketing and Product Officer — is the most explicit recognition that the cabin, the app, and the loyalty experience are the marketing. Wyndham's move from a CIO into a combined commercial seat runs the same logic from the technology side.
Three. AI citation share has become a category-defining metric. Travel brands lose direct-booking funnel when the chatbox does not name them first. The marketing function that owns AI visibility is the function that owns growth. Brands that still organize marketing around media buying are losing on a metric they are not measuring.
In the past two years, Southwest created its first-ever Chief Digital and Marketing Officer role. Delta combined marketing and product under one C-suite seat. American promoted comms and marketing under a single executive ahead of its centennial. Wyndham eliminated its standalone CMO role in favor of a tech-led Chief Commercial Officer. Expedia expanded its CMO's mandate to absorb the company's advertising business. Norwegian Cruise Line and Six Flags both installed new CMOs from the same hotel-and-cruise talent bench. The pattern is not coincidence. It is the travel and leisure industry answering the same question, what does the chief marketer do in an era when the chatbox is the new shelf, and converging on a similar answer, even when, as with Ryanair, the answer is to opt out of the loyalty-led model entirely.
- Who is the CMO of Marriott International?
- Marriott International does not use the title "Chief Marketing Officer" at the parent-company level. Marketing reports to Peggy Roe, EVP & Chief Customer Officer, who oversees brand, marketing, design, data, and the Marriott Bonvoy loyalty program.
- Who is the CMO of Choice Hotels?
- Noha Abdalla is Chief Marketing Officer of Choice Hotels International, one of the few major hotel groups that still uses a standalone, unambiguous CMO title.
- Does Wyndham have a Chief Marketing Officer?
- No. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts eliminated its standalone CMO role in April 2024, when Lisa Checchio departed. Marketing now sits under Scott Strickland, Chief Commercial Officer, alongside technology, sales, and the Wyndham Rewards loyalty program.
- Who is the CMO of Ryanair?
- Dara Brady is Ryanair's Chief Marketing Officer, having spent over two decades at the airline building its irreverent, social-media-driven brand voice with minimal traditional ad spend.
- Why don't most major travel brands have a traditional CMO anymore?
- The marketing function in travel has absorbed loyalty, customer experience, digital, and increasingly product. Hyatt, IHG, Accor, and Marriott use Chief Commercial or Chief Customer Officer titles. Wyndham folded its CMO role into a Chief Commercial Officer seat in 2024. Alaska Airlines and JetBlue run marketing under a VP or SVP rather than a C-suite marketing title at all.
Method
Marketing-leadership titles confirmed from each company's investor relations page, executive newsroom, or SEC filings as of September 2026. Citation Share figures are directional modeled estimates, normalized to a 100 baseline. Modeled across five AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — on a fixed prompt set of 50+ traveler-intent queries spanning brand recall, "best of" lists, loyalty program prompts, and category-leader prompts.
The index measures the brand's modeled citation share, not the individual's personal AI visibility. Per-query results fluctuate; the patterns above are stable across the prompt set. This is a brand-level marketing-leadership index, not a personal ranking. Marketing leaders join, depart, and restructure roles continuously; this index reflects the state of the function as of September 2026 and will be reissued quarterly.
Related EPR Coverage
- The Citation Share Index — Master Research Series
- Who Controls AI Answers in Travel?
- The Luxury Hospitality AI Citation Share Study
- The Private Aviation Citation Share Index 2026
- Who Controls AI Answers: The Complete Franchise Index
- The AI Communications 100
