In this episode of The Room Key, I’m joined by Chris Zhao, CRME—Senior Product Manager for SEM/SEO at Travel Media Group—to talk about the reality of hotel digital marketing in 2026: every channel is crowded, every click is paid, and “rank higher” isn’t a strategy anymore.

Chris lays out a framework he calls Trust-led Multichannel Growth—the idea that the real bottleneck for most hotels isn’t traffic or tech…it’s trust. When travelers trust your hotel, every channel performs better: higher conversion, stronger loyalty, and more stability when the market gets weird. We also unpack what AI is changing in search, why “authenticity” is replacing old-school ranking as a trust signal, and how to think about distribution across OTAs, direct, metasearch, social, and emerging AI discovery without getting lost in attribution chaos.

If you’re an owner/operator trying to grow bookings without lighting money on fire, this is a practical reset: what to focus on, what to ignore, and how to build a channel mix that holds up over time.

We cover:

1. Why “trust” is the new performance lever in hotel marketing
2. SEO/SEM in an AI-search world: what changes, what doesn’t
3. A clean way to think about multichannel distribution
4. Why content and reputation signals matter more than most owners think