Pitching · 6 min read

Most creator pitches never get read. Not because they are bad, but because they arrive at the wrong inbox.

The address on a hotel's contact page usually goes to reservations. That team handles bookings, cancellations and room queries all day. A collaboration proposal is not their job, and in most cases they have no authority to say yes to one. Your email either gets deleted or forwarded to somewhere it dies quietly.

The person you want is in marketing, PR or communications. At a small property it might be the general manager. At a group it might sit at regional level. Finding them takes a few minutes and changes your reply rate more than anything you write in the pitch itself.

Here is how to do it.

Start with the hotel's own website

Scroll to the footer, not the contact page. Hotels bury useful addresses in places most people never look.

Look for pages labelled Press, Media, Newsroom or Partnerships. Larger properties and groups often publish a media contact there, sometimes with a name attached. That address exists specifically for people who want to write about the hotel, which is close enough to what you are proposing.

If there is a press kit or fact sheet available for download, open it. Media contacts are frequently printed on the last page.

Check the restaurant and spa pages separately

This one catches people out. Hotels with a notable restaurant, rooftop bar or spa often run those as semi-independent operations with their own websites and their own contact details.

Those microsites are far less guarded than the main hotel site. A restaurant page will often list a marketing or events contact by name, because they need to handle bookings, press and private hire enquiries. That person usually sits inside the same marketing department as the hotel.

Search for the restaurant name rather than the hotel name and see what comes up.

Use LinkedIn to find the person, then work out the email

LinkedIn tells you who exists. It rarely tells you their email, but that is fine, because email addresses at a given hotel almost always follow one pattern.

Search the hotel name plus a job title:

• Marketing Manager
• Director of Marketing
• PR Manager
• Communications Manager
• Director of Sales and Marketing
• Social Media Manager

At independent hotels you will often find one person covering all of it. At chains, look for someone attached to the specific property rather than head office, because local marketing teams have far more freedom to approve a collaboration than corporate does.

Once you have a name, work out the format. Look at any published staff email on the site. If you find maria.costa@hotelname.com, then firstname.lastname@ is the pattern and you can construct the rest.

Ask on Instagram, but ask the right question

Sending your whole pitch as a DM is a mistake. It gets skimmed and forgotten, and whoever runs the account is often an agency or a junior with no decision-making power.

Send something short instead:

Hi, I'm a content creator visiting the area soon. Who is the best person to contact about a collaboration, or is there a marketing email I could use?

That is easy to answer in ten seconds and it costs the person nothing. It also gets you past reservations entirely, because you have gone around them rather than through them.

Ask the question, get the address, then send a proper pitch by email. The guide to pitching a hotel for a collaboration covers what to write once you have the contact.

Look at TripAdvisor management responses

Hotels reply to reviews on TripAdvisor, and those replies are usually signed. Not always with an email, but almost always with a name and a role.

You will see things like "Kind regards, Elena Rossi, Guest Relations Manager" or occasionally a marketing title. That gives you a real person to search on LinkedIn or to construct an address for.

This is particularly useful for independent hotels in Europe, where management responds personally rather than through a template.

Try industry directories

Hotels that host events, conferences and weddings list themselves in MICE directories, and those listings almost always include a commercial or marketing contact rather than a booking line.

The same goes for tour operator sites. Hotels that work with travel agencies publish a contact for partnership enquiries, because that is how the relationship works. That address is far closer to the right department than anything on the public contact page.

When there is genuinely only a generic address

Sometimes there is no marketing team. Small boutiques, family-run properties and guesthouses often have one shared inbox and an owner who reads it.

That is not a dead end. In those cases the generic address is the decision maker, and your pitch will be read by the person who can actually approve it. These properties are frequently the most receptive to creator collaborations precisely because they have no marketing budget and no agency.

If you are writing to a shared inbox at a larger hotel, open with one line that helps it travel:

Could you please forward this to whoever handles marketing or partnerships?

It is a small thing and it works more often than you would expect.

Verify before you send

An email that bounces is worse than no email, because you will never know whether the hotel saw your pitch or not.

Two quick checks:

Look at the domain. A hotel in Italy with a .gr address, or a boutique property using a personal Gmail, is worth a second look. It might be a group with foreign ownership, or it might simply be wrong.

Send a short test first if you are unsure. A one-line enquiry that bounces tells you the address is dead before you have spent time on a real pitch.

What this looks like in practice

For one hotel, this whole process takes five to fifteen minutes. Website footer, LinkedIn search, work out the pattern, verify.

For twenty hotels in one city, it takes an evening.

For a whole country, it takes weeks, which is why most creators give up and send everything to info@ instead. That is the real reason so many pitches go unanswered. Not the writing, the address.

This is the work behind Hotel Creators. The database holds 33,986 properties across 85 countries, and the contacts in it are collected and maintained rather than scraped. When one stops working, a member reports it and we replace it.

But the method above works whether you use a database or not, and it is worth knowing regardless. Our study of 33,540 hotel contact addresses shows how often creators face a shared inbox instead of a named person. A structured hotel creator program can shorten this research by providing direct, maintained contacts.

Common questions

Should I email the general manager?
At small properties, yes, often they decide everything. At larger hotels the GM will forward it to marketing at best, so go directly to marketing where you can.

Is it better to call?
Rarely. Reception will take a message that goes nowhere. If you do call, ask only for the marketing email rather than trying to pitch on the phone.

What if the marketing contact does not reply?
That is normal and it is not a rejection. Most collaborations happen after a follow-up rather than on the first email. Give it five days, then send one short hotel follow-up email.

Do chains work differently?
Yes. Individual properties within a chain usually have their own marketing contact, and that person has more freedom than head office. Pitch the property, not the brand.

Can I use a contact-finding tool?
Tools like Apollo and Hunter work well for verifying an address once you know the person and the domain. They are less useful for deciding who to contact in the first place, which is the harder part.

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