Touched on this in my LinkedIn post the other day–below’s the full thought:

There’s a question I’m beginning to ask about every hospitality brand that I look at: “What would you lose if you removed your name from the content?”

For most brands, the honest answer is, “nothing.” The posts would still make sense. A pool photo is a pool photo. A room shot is a room shot. That post of a white bathrobe is just as it is: generic.

That’s the identity problem, and it’s more widespread than the industry wants to admit…

…but The Carlton Collection, they just made a move that leads me to answer that question differently for them.

The Decision

Carlton Collection is a group of hotels and hospitality destinations, including two DesignHotels™ properties, that had been operating as an umbrella company while its individual properties functioned almost entirely as independents. No visible thread connecting them. No master narrative. Just a holding name that guests largely ignored.

Amsterdam-based agency, D8, was brought in to fix that. The rebrand they delivered is interesting on multiple levels, but the detail that intrigued me was this: they dropped the word “hotel” from the name.

As Carlton Collection, the brand now expands beyond accommodation to encompass the restaurants, the bars, and the broader experiences each destination carries. Rosie Street, D8’s Managing Director, framed the challenge directly: “The Carlton Collection’s biggest challenge was that it didn’t exist as a brand in the consumer’s consciousness.”

So they did something most hospitality groups are too cautious to do. They changed the frame.

What a Word “Hotel” Carries

The thing about the word “hotel” is that it comes loaded with transactional expectations.. You book a room, you check in, you check out, you leave a review. The word “hotel” signals a category that most consumers already have a price-anchored, OTA-mediated relationship with. It’s a commodity word. And if your brand is competing in a commodity category, you will eventually compete primarily on price.

Dropping “hotel” from the name doesn’t just change what Carlton Collection is called; rather, it changes what game they’re playing.

It’s a reframe from accommodation to curation. From a place to stay, to a world to explore. The new loyalty program, ‘ON-US,’ reinforces this. Instead of a traditional tier-based scheme that rewards repetition at a single property, ON-US gives guests access to perks and discounts across the entire portfolio. The goal, in their words, is to foster exploration rather than reward repetition.

That’s a meaningful philosophical difference. It’s saying: we don’t want to trap you. We want to show you more.

The Industry Context

This move lands at an interesting moment. Everywhere we look, hospitality marketing discourse is about tactics: the right AI tools, the right posting cadence, the right influencer tier, etc. Yes, that matters, but “trends can be tactics, but identity is the strategy. Successful brands treat identity as a compass, not a trend feed (FSR Magazine, 2026).”

That’s it. That’s the mote.

Calvin Tilokee, founder of Revpar Media, made a related point from a different angle… He came up through hotel revenue management before building a hospitality marketing company, and his framework is grounded in that operational lens. The core insight: “pretty is the baseline.” In a landscape where every property can publish polished visuals, aesthetics alone are no longer enough to differentiate or convert. What moves people is authentic storytelling built around audience clarity and booking intent, not just pretty pictures.

I think both of these points–the identity argument and the storytelling argument–point to the same underlying problem:

The industry got very good at producing content. It didn’t get as good at producing meaning.

The Execution Problem

There’s a third piece to this that I find interesting to talk about… The Lure Agency’s COO published a piece this week that I respect for its honesty: “If your agency’s value proposition is ‘we write blog posts’ or ‘we manage your social calendar,’ you are competing against software. That’s not a sustainable position.”

AI has commoditized execution. Blog posts. Ad variations. Social captions. Strategy outlines. The production layer of marketing is being automated faster than I think we want to acknowledge. What this means is that the value isn’t solely in the output anymore; it’s in the thinking that comes before the output. The brand clarity. The narrative architecture. The decision about what not to be.

This is what D8 delivered for Carlton Collection. Not just a new visual system (though the visual system is truly excellent with a bespoke wordmark where each letter is individually crafted, and more), but a strategic reframe that now gives the creative and content teams a north star.

Most agencies don’t do that – they arrive after the identity decisions have been made — or avoided, and build content on top of whatever foundation the brand happened to have. Which is fine if the foundation is solid. But for a lot of hospitality brands, it isn’t.

What This Actually Requires

The Carlton Collection story is instructive not just because the rebrand worked, but because of what had to be true for it to work. Someone in that organization had to be willing to say, “we have a brand problem, not a content problem.” And that fixing the brand problem will require us to make uncomfortable decisions about what we are and aren’t.

Dropping a word from your name is a *seemingly* small decision with very large implications: It touches the website, the signage, booking platforms, staff training, guest communications.. everything. It’s the kind of decision that feels risky and looks obvious in retrospect.

The brands that are building real brand equity right now are the ones making these kinds of decisions. Not “what should we post this week?” but “what do we fundamentally stand for, and how does every piece of communication express that?”

One is a content question. The other is a business question.

The hospitality industry needs to get better at asking the second one.