Hotel marketing agency pricing and what hospitality marketing agencies charge per post, video and year

Short answer: of the hotel and hospitality marketing vendors we checked, twelve US companies print a price on their own website, and none of them is one of the large hotel agencies. Put on one basis, a managed social media post costs about $16 to $188, a finished hotel or vacation rental video $650 to $20,000, and a year of hotel SEO $36,000. Not one US vendor we read publishes a price for running a hotel's Facebook and Instagram ads, and none sells the script for a short video ad on its own.

Search for hotel marketing agency pricing and you get listicles written by agencies and directories, with a starting fee printed next to each name. We checked those names against the agencies' own websites in October 2026. Gourmet Marketing, listed in one roundup at $1,500 a month, says on its own site that its "pricing is customized". Percepture, listed in another at "10-15% of spend", publishes only an SEO figure, and it is a monthly fee, not a percentage. So we set the roundups aside and read the vendors' own pages, then put what they publish on comparable units: cost per post, cost per finished video, monthly fee and first-year fee.

A disclosure first. We sell a generator that writes briefs and timed scripts for short video ads, including hotel Facebook ad scripts. We do not run ads, manage social accounts, film or edit, so we are in none of the tables below. We have an interest in the point about scripts near the end, and we say so there.

How much does a hotel marketing agency cost?

Between about $355 and $3,500 a month in the fixed monthly fees that US hospitality vendors publish, depending almost entirely on which slice of marketing you buy. The low end is a social posting service. The high end is SEO, or social management across several vacation rentals. These are the vendors with a monthly price on their own site.

Q4Launch's own arithmetic is rounded. $1,500 plus twelve months at $297 comes to $5,064, which its page shows as $5,000. It is a small gap, and a useful reminder to ask for the figure that will be on the invoice.

What does hotel social media management cost per post?

About $16 to $188 per post, a factor of roughly twelve, once each package is divided by the number of posts it includes.

The spread is not effort per post. It is what else the fee covers. Travel Media Group's figure is the price of a posting schedule. StorySpace's covers Stories, engagement, DM monitoring and influencer management on top of the posts. Elevated Escapes doubles its fee once you have four or more rentals for the same number of posts, so you are paying for the number of properties represented, not the number of posts. Compare on per post only after you know which of those you need.

What does a hotel video cost?

$650 to $20,000 per finished video among the US vendors that publish, and the price follows length, crew time and whether it is a vacation rental walkthrough or a produced brand film.

Two caveats. The vacation rental studios at the top of the table film a property, not an ad: the deliverable is a walkthrough for a listing, and a 59 second reel is the closest thing to a paid social cut. And Zip In Media's and Beverly Boy's tiers are general price lists shown on hospitality pages, not hotel-only packages. For photography alone, RE Media Utah prints $1,850 for a boutique hotel shoot, $2,750 for a mid-size property and $4,250 for a resort.

What does a hotel marketing agency charge to run Facebook ads?

No US hospitality vendor we read publishes it. Every agency we found that offers hotel Facebook and Instagram ads either quotes on request or folds the ads into an unpriced retainer. The only first-party price for managing a hotel's Meta ads that we found anywhere is a UK agency, Webb Marketing, at "£200 per month" in management with a recommended minimum of "£300 per month" in ad spend, "typically £500 to £800 all in".

The US numbers you will see for this, usually "$1,500 to $3,000 a month to start", come from roundups. We could not find any of them on the agencies' own sites. If you are getting proposals, ask each agency to split three lines: the management fee, the creative (who makes the videos and how many a month) and the ad spend. Most proposals merge the first two, and the creative is the one that decides whether the campaign works.

What does hotel marketing cost in the first year?

From about $4,260 to $42,000 in fees among the published plans, before ad spend, a factor of about ten.

The large hotel agencies publish nothing, so they are not in this table, and they are the ones most hotels with a marketing budget will talk to. Mediaboom, Gourmet Marketing, Hotels Filmed and Lodging Interactive quote on request, and we found no price on the homepages of Screen Pilot, Blue Magnet Interactive, Cendyn, Milestone, O'Rourke Hospitality, Tambourine, Fuel Travel, GCommerce or Mad Fish Digital. Expect a call before you see a number.

How much should a hotel spend on marketing?

Industry research gives two useful anchors, both older than we would like. CBRE Hotels Research found US hotels spent "$3,361 per available room" on sales and marketing in 2017, across 3,461 properties, and that labor was "56.4 percent" of that department's costs while "advertising (3.8 percent of department expenses)" was a small slice. By that measure, advertising averaged about $128 per room per year. CBRE also reported sales and marketing rising from "9.2 percent in 2019 to 11.9 in 2020" as a share of total revenue, a jump driven by revenue falling during the pandemic.

The second anchor is acquisition cost. A 2016 Kalibri Labs study for the HSMAI Foundation found "On average, hotels will pay 16-18% of guest-paid revenue in customer acquisition costs", with third-party payments, mostly online travel agency commissions, running "7-15% of Guest-Paid Revenue". That is the number to keep in your head when a proposal arrives. Any direct booking campaign that costs less per booking than the commission you would have paid on the same stay is already profitable.

Why do hotel marketing vendors price so differently?

Because they are selling five different things under one label. A posting service sells a schedule. A social agency sells someone's attention to your accounts. A video studio sells a day of filming and the edit. An SEO agency sells months of work on your website. A booking platform sells software. The listicles put all five in one table with one range, and that is how a hotel ends up comparing a $355 posting plan with a $3,000 SEO retainer as if they were two prices for the same thing.

The other reason is the size of the property. The vendors who publish are small, and they price for independent hotels, inns and rentals. The agencies that work for groups and flagged hotels price per engagement, and do not publish because the scope is different for every client.

Where does the hotel video ad script come from?

Usually from whoever is holding the camera. Look back at the video table: every vendor prices filming and editing, and none prices the script for a 20 second ad separately. That is fine for a listing walkthrough, which does not need one. It is a problem for a paid ad, where the first two seconds decide whether anyone watches the rest and the price line has legal weight.

That is the part we sell, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. A hotel ad that shows a nightly rate has to show the total price, resort fee included, more prominently than any other price, under the FTC's fee rule in force since May 2025. A creator who stayed for free has to say so. And a room tour that opens on the lobby instead of the view loses most of its audience before the room appears. A brief and script generator writes the hook, the timed shots, the captions and the ad copy for $49 a month, the first one with no account; your team or a creator you hire films it. Our hotel Facebook ads page shows what the script contains, line by line, with the fee rule quoted at its source.

How to choose a hotel marketing agency

Start from the unit you want to buy, then compare only vendors who sell that unit.

• If you want direct bookings this season, ask agencies for the management fee, the creative and the ad spend as three lines, and ask how many new videos a month the fee includes. A management fee with no creative behind it runs the same photos as every booking site.
• If you want a steady social presence, a posting service costs a few thousand dollars a year. Ask whether the posts are written for your property or adapted from a shared library.
• If you want video, decide whether you need a listing walkthrough or an ad. Vacation rental studios are good value for the first. For the second, plan the hook and the price line before the shoot, and ask for a 9:16 cut as a deliverable.
• If you film in-house, pay for the script and the edit separately, and keep the approved price line with the finished file.

Footage you already paid for can work harder than one ad. The same room tour can loop on digital signage in the lobby and the elevator landings, where guests decide whether to book the spa or the restaurant. If you are also weighing short-form agencies, our TikTok ad agency pricing article puts nine of them on the same basis, and UGC testimonials covers how to brief a guest story so it stays in the guest's own words.

All prices were read on each vendor's own website in October 2026. Vendors change prices, so check the live page before you sign anything.