Data & Insights · 6 min read

Every creator who has pitched a hotel knows the feeling. You write a good email, you send it, and nothing comes back. Then it happens again, and again, and you start to wonder whether the problem is you.

It usually is not. It is the address.

We run a database of hotels that work with content creators, and in September 2026 we analysed every property in it: 33,540 hotels and resorts, with 33,392 valid contact addresses between them. We wanted to know a simple thing. When a hotel publishes a contact, is it a person or is it a shared inbox?

The answer explains a great deal about why creator outreach fails.

Only 29.9% of hotel contacts are a named person

Of 33,392 valid addresses, 9,994 are personal-name addresses like maria.costa@hotelname.com. The remaining 23,398 are generic, meaning info@, reservations@, contact@ and similar.

That is a 30/70 split, and it is worse than most people assume.

A generic inbox is not useless, but it is a different thing entirely. It is monitored by whoever handles bookings that day. A collaboration proposal arriving there competes with cancellations, room queries and group enquiries, and the person reading it has no authority to say yes.

A named marketing contact reads your email as part of their job.

One address appears on a third of all hotels

The single most common contact in the entire database is info@.

It appears on 11,562 properties. That is 34.5% of every hotel we hold, and 49.4% of all generic addresses. One prefix, a third of the industry.

Here are the fifteen most common generic prefixes:

Notice how far down marketing@ sits. Only 124 hotels in 33,540 publish a marketing address at all. That is 0.4%.

If you have been sending pitches to whatever address appears on a hotel's contact page, there is roughly a one in three chance it was info@, and a one in two-hundred-and-seventy chance it reached anything marketing-related.

Where you pitch matters more than how you pitch

The country-by-country breakdown is where this gets genuinely useful, because the differences are enormous.

Latin America is the outlier. Hotels there publish named contacts at more than twice the rate of Western Europe.

Western Europe is the opposite, and the countries creators most want to visit are among the hardest to reach.

Italy is the biggest market in our database with 4,431 properties, and only 776 of them publish a named contact. Switzerland is worse at 16.9%. Greece, another creator favourite, sits at 19.7%.

Spain and Portugal are the European exceptions, at 47.1% and 49.8%.

What this means if you are pitching

Three things follow from the numbers.

Your reply rate is partly geography. If you have pitched forty Italian hotels and heard nothing, that is not a reflection of your work. Roughly thirty-three of those forty emails went to a shared inbox.

Finding the person is the highest-leverage work you can do. Not writing a better pitch, not building a better portfolio. Finding out who actually reads collaboration emails at that specific property. We wrote a separate guide on how to find a hotel's marketing contact that covers seven methods.

Follow-ups matter more when the address is generic. An email to info@ needs a second nudge more often than one to a named person, because the first one may never have been forwarded. Our guide on the follow-up email covers the timing.

Two more things the data showed

Free stays dominate paid work. Across the database, 93% of properties are open to a complimentary stay in exchange for content, and 7% are set up for paid UGC arrangements. Paid work exists, but it is a much smaller pool and it requires a different pitch. We cover that in how much to charge hotels for content.

Hotels are concentrated in very few places. Just five countries account for a third of every property we hold. Paris, Bali, Rome, Milan and London are the five densest cities. If you are pitching anywhere else, you are competing with far fewer creators, which is worth knowing when you plan a trip.

A note on method, and on ourselves

This analysis covers our own database, so it is fair to ask whether it reflects hotels generally or just the ones we happen to hold.

Two things. First, our properties are drawn from across 85 countries and every category from guesthouses to luxury resorts, so the sample is broad. Second, we have no incentive to publish a number that says 70% of our contacts are generic inboxes. We are publishing it because it is true, and because knowing it makes creators better at this.

We classify addresses using the same scoring we use inside the product: local parts matching common role words, digit patterns and length rules are treated as generic, and everything resembling a human name is treated as personal. The method is imperfect at the margins. A hotel called Golden Beach using goldenbeach@ may score as personal. We would rather state that plainly than pretend the number is exact.

The 9,994 named contacts are the part of the database creators use most, and improving that share is where most of our work goes. Someone reports a contact that does not work, we find a better one, and the number moves.

Common questions

Is a generic inbox worth pitching at all?
Yes, especially at small independent properties where the owner reads it personally. It is less useful at larger hotels where it goes to a booking team.

Why do so few hotels publish a marketing email?
Most do not have a dedicated marketing person. At small properties the owner handles it. At larger ones marketing sits behind reception on the public site, deliberately, because otherwise they receive constant pitches.

Does this mean Italy is a bad place to pitch?
No. It means the effort per hotel is higher. Italy has 4,431 properties in our database, more than anywhere else, and 776 of them publish a named contact. That is still a substantial list.

How often does this data change?
Continuously. Contacts move, hotels change staff, addresses expire. We update the database daily and members report contacts that stop working.

Can I get the underlying numbers?
The tables above are the full picture for the top countries. If you want the per-country breakdown for somewhere not listed, get in touch and we will pull it.

---

Hotel Creators holds 33,000+ properties across 85 countries that work with content creators, with contacts maintained daily. €19 a month, cancel any time.

Access 33,986+ hotels open to creator collabs

Join creators landing free stays worldwide. Browse hotels by country, filter by collaboration type, and get direct contact details.

Get started →