Building the Guest Acquisition Flywheel
Funnels are fine. But funnels end.
The smarter metaphor for guest acquisition in 2025 is the flywheel: a system where every guest acquired feeds momentum back into the top, making the next guest cheaper, faster, and easier to acquire.
How do you build that flywheel? With loyalty.
From Funnel to Flywheel
Traditional funnels are linear: awareness, consideration, booking, stay, repeat. Guests move through, and you start over again with a new ad campaign.
The flywheel is circular: one guest acquired not only comes back but also powers acquisition of the next guest through advocacy, referrals, and content.
Loyalty is the lubricant that keeps the flywheel spinning. Without it, friction slows everything down.
The Persona Drivers
Think about how each persona fuels your acquisition flywheel.
The Social Sharer posts about your property, fueling new demand. The Brand Believer refers friends, lowering your acquisition costs. The Family Planner brings ten people with them, multiplying the value of one booking. The Local Loyalist fills off-peak gaps, stabilizing revenue so you can invest more in marketing.
When loyalty is embedded in acquisition, every persona becomes an engine.
Practical Flywheel Mechanics
Here’s how you actually make it work:
Step one: Capture the guest with an instant reward at booking.
Step two: Deliver a great stay with perks that align to their persona.
Step three: Reward post-stay actions like reviews, referrals, shares that pull new guests into the funnel.
Step four: Repeat.
Over time, your marketing costs drop because your own guests are doing the work OTAs used to charge you for.
The Laasie Advantage
Laasie is not just a loyalty engine. It’s a flywheel builder.
By embedding rewards across the guest journey—pre-stay, in-stay, and post-stay—we help hotels create loops instead of lines. Each guest acquired is no longer just revenue—they’re fuel for the next guest.
And the more momentum you build, the harder it is for competitors or OTAs to slow you down.
The Takeaway
Loyalty is not a downstream program. It’s an upstream acquisition strategy, a marketing ROI multiplier, and a flywheel builder.
Hotels that understand this will stop leaking money to OTAs and start owning their guest relationships again. Hotels that don’t will keep pouring champagne into a colander.
At Laasie, we’re here to make sure you’re in the first camp. Because loyalty isn’t about points. It’s about people. And people are the most powerful marketing channel you’ll ever have.