A single question is quietly disrupting one of hospitality's most comfortable assumptions. It's not whether your hotel is beautifully designed. Not whether your team delivers warm, genuine service. Not even whether your brand story is compelling.
The question is simpler, and more demanding than that: Are you relevant to the specific person making the decision, in the specific moment they are making it?
This is important because relevance — not authenticity, not uniqueness — is what drives choice.
The problem with authenticity
"Authenticity" became hospitality's favorite word for good reason. It pushed back against the sterile, transactional hotel experience. It said: We are human, we have a story, we stand for something.
That instinct was right.
But somewhere along the way, authenticity stopped being a standard and became a script.
Scroll through hotel websites across markets and segments today. The language is remarkably consistent. Everyone uses phrases like "authentic experiences," or "curated journeys," or maybe "bespoke service." Every brand, from budget to ultra-luxury, speaks in the same register.
The problem is not that these claims are false. The problem is that they are indistinguishable.
Authenticity, as the industry now uses it, is self-declared. It describes intent. It says nothing about whether that intent lands differently for different guests. And in a market where everyone is authentic, the word has ceased to mean anything at all.
Guests do not choose intent. They choose what feels right for them.
The real gap is relevance
Here is one of the clearest commercial truths in hospitality: When price becomes the dominant point of comparison, value was never made visible.
This is not a pricing problem; it is a relevance problem.
When guests can clearly see why a property fits their specific needs — their trip type, their priorities, their moment — rate becomes contextual. It sits inside a framework of understood value. But when the offering is generic, or communicated generically, price becomes the only available filter.
Commercial performance, then, is not primarily a function of yield management or distribution strategy. It is a function of how clearly and specifically value is communicated to the right person at the right time.
Which brings us to the real structural issue:
USPs are the wrong game
The industry has spent decades building and marketing Unique Selling Points. The assumption is straightforward: Identify what makes you different, communicate it clearly, win the booking.
But look at the modern hotel landscape honestly. What is truly unique?
Rooms, spas, dining, wellness facilities, local experiences — these have largely converged. The gap between a well-run four-star and a premium five-star, in terms of physical product, has narrowed significantly. Competing on uniqueness, in a market where assets have standardized, is a game most hotels cannot win.
The differentiation that actually drives conversion is not about what no one else has.
It is about what matters most to this guest, right now.
From USP to RSP
The shift that commercial and marketing leaders need to make is from Unique Selling Points to Relevant Selling Points.
The distinction is not semantic. It changes how you build content, how you segment communication and how you measure whether your messaging is working.
Consider a quiet beachfront property. For a honeymooning couple, that stillness is the entire reason to book. For a group looking for energy and social atmosphere, it is a reason to look elsewhere. The asset has not changed. The meaning has changed entirely, depending on who is evaluating it and why.
A family program converts one guest and creates noise for another. A design-led aesthetic inspires one traveler and alienates a different one. Features do not carry inherent value. They carry potential value, activated by context and relevance.
RSPs require hotels to stop asking "what do we offer?" and start asking "what does this matter to, and to whom?"
That means sharper segmentation. It means content built for specific moments in the guest journey, because the way you inspire an undecided traveler is not the way you close a booking, and neither is the way you retain a repeat guest. Consistency of values, yes. But expression that adapts to context.
The AI complication
This is where the stakes get significantly higher.
AI is already reshaping how guests search, compare and make decisions. And it introduces a specific risk that the industry has not yet fully reckoned with.
AI is built to be helpful. When information is incomplete, it fills the gaps, drawing on patterns, categories and assumptions. A five-star resort is assumed to offer certain things. A boutique city hotel is assumed to provide a certain experience. The model completes the picture, whether or not that picture is accurate.
For hotels with vague, generic or poorly structured content, AI does not amplify their story. It replaces it with a plausible approximation — one that looks like every other property in the same category.
The sameness problem, already significant, accelerates.
Storytelling alone will not solve this. What AI rewards is structured, specific and verifiable content -- signal clarity rather than narrative warmth. Not broader claims, but sharper ones. Not more content, but content that is precisely matched to context and audience.
The question worth asking
Authenticity is a comfortable standard. It asks us to be true to ourselves.
Relevance is a harder one. It asks us to be right for someone else -- in their context, at their moment, for their specific decision.
Guests do not reward consistency of voice. They reward being understood.
In a market where AI fills every gap we leave behind, and fills it with something generic, the properties that will outperform are those that have defined their value with enough precision to be irreplaceable.
Not just authentic.
Chosen.
Philip Schaetz is founder and managing director of CUBE. Prior to establishing CUBE in 2018, Philip enjoyed a long career in revenue management, distribution expertise and sales and marketing strategy in senior global positions for some of the world’s largest hotel & resort brands.This column is part of ISHC Global Insights, a partnership between CoStar News and the International Society of Hospitality Consultants.
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