Your marketing budget and your pricing strategy have never met each other.
Two of the most important levers in your business, how you attract guests and how you price for them, operating in complete isolation. Different tools. Different dashboards. Different people making decisions. And in most cases, neither one knows what the other is doing.
"Marketing and revenue is siloed. They don't talk to each other. And it's a huge miss."
— Brock, 170-listing operator
He's right. And the miss is bigger than most operators realize.
The expensive disconnect
Here's how it typically works. You run Google Ads or Meta campaigns to drive traffic to your direct booking site. Maybe you're spending $1,000 a month, maybe $3,000. The marketing side of the operation is focused on one thing: get people to the site. Impressions, clicks, cost per click. That's the scorecard.
Meanwhile, your pricing is set by a revenue tool or a revenue manager looking at comp data, seasonality, and booking pace. They're adjusting rates based on what the supply side tells them. What similar properties charge. How far out the bookings are. What last year looked like.
These two functions never intersect.
So you end up with situations like this: your marketing campaign is working. Traffic is up 30% this month. You're driving high-intent visitors to your site from a targeted campaign aimed at families planning spring break trips. Real demand. Real interest.
But your revenue tool just dropped your rates because booking pace is behind last year's. It doesn't know about the campaign. It doesn't know that the people landing on your site right now are families with higher budgets than your typical guest. It sees slow bookings and does what it's programmed to do. Lower the price.
You're paying to bring in guests who would pay more, then greeting them with a discount they didn't need.
The reverse is just as bad
Flip it around. Your revenue manager has priced a premium weekend at $450/night based on historical demand and comp analysis. Strong rate, justified by the data. But your marketing this month is running a broad campaign that's attracting budget-conscious travelers. Couples looking for a deal. Travelers comparing you against ten other options.
The marketing is sending the wrong traffic for the price. The pricing is set for an audience that isn't arriving. Neither side knows it.
"They spend a thousand dollars, they don't get a booking, and they go, 'oh, I just threw a thousand dollars down the drain.'"
— Conrad, revenue management consultant
They didn't necessarily throw it away. They just sent the traffic to a price that didn't match.
And here's the thing. That operator will often blame the marketing. "Ads don't work for vacation rentals." Or they'll blame the pricing tool. "It priced me out of the market." Neither diagnosis is right. The problem is that the two systems are blind to each other.
Why this silo exists
It's not because operators are careless. It's because the tools were built separately and nobody connected them.
Marketing tools measure traffic. Revenue tools manage rates. There's no layer in between that says: here's who is actually on your site, here's what they're willing to spend, and here's how your current price compares to their expectations.
Hotels have revenue management systems that ingest demand data from multiple channels and adjust pricing by segment. They know when corporate travel is trending up and can price accordingly while marketing targets a different type of guest for off-peak. The marketing and revenue functions share a common view of demand.
Vacation rentals don't have that shared view. Marketing looks at traffic. Revenue looks at calendars. The guest in the middle, the actual human deciding whether to book, is invisible to both.
What it actually costs
The silo doesn't just waste ad spend. It compounds.
When marketing and pricing are disconnected, you can't optimize either one properly. You can't tell your marketing team to target higher-value guests because you don't know which types of guests are converting. You can't tell your revenue manager to hold rates because you don't know that a wave of high-intent traffic is about to land.
Every decision on one side creates a blind spot on the other. And operators end up in a loop: spend on marketing, see inconsistent results, question the spend, cut the budget, watch direct bookings dry up, go back to the OTAs. The silo didn't just cost them a few bookings. It cost them their direct channel.
"Overpricing doesn't just lose bookings. It's a death blow to your ad performance."
— Conrad
You're training the algorithm with bad data. Sending traffic that doesn't convert. Telling Google that your landing pages don't work when the real problem is the rate on them.
Marketing and revenue aren't two separate problems. They're two halves of the same problem. And until they share a common signal, operators will keep optimizing each one in a vacuum and wondering why the results don't add up.