Ahead of the Hospitality Social Media Summit, taking place in London on 3–4 September 2026, we spoke with Ben Lilly, one of the summit’s faculty and one of the most experienced voices in luxury digital marketing to high-net-worth audiences.
Ben is the Founder and CEO of Giant Leap Digital, a luxury growth and performance agency for premium brands. He has spent more than two decades in luxury and financial digital marketing. Before founding Giant Leap, he was Managing Director of Verb Brands, later acquired by Croud. A recognised thought leader in the high-net-worth space, he works with distinctive hospitality names including Corinthia Hotels, The Ritz London, Maybourne Hotel Group and Almanac Hotels.
In this interview, Ben explains why affluent, high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth audiences behave very differently online, and why treating them as one audience is a costly mistake. He sets out why leading with a discount does a luxury brand more harm than good, why strategy has to come before tactics in paid social, and how to measure social’s influence when the path to a booking is rarely linear. He previews The Social Revenue Blueprint, his Day 2 lab, where delegates rebuild a hotel’s social strategy around desire, rate and direct bookings, and leave with a blueprint for their own property.
You have spent more than two decades building campaigns for luxury and financial brands targeting high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth audiences. What do most hospitality marketers misunderstand about how these consumers behave online, and where do they go wrong by treating them as one audience?
We actually break this down into more segments: Affluent, Wealthy, HNW, UHNW, and Billionaires. The difference between these audiences is large—not just in terms of financial wealth, but in what is important to them.
To talk about just two segments, HNW and UHNW, the difference in wealth would be £1m in disposable income for HNW compared to £30m+ for UHNW.
At £1m, people have generally earned this wealth. They have typically come from humble beginnings and, as a result, they are keen to show the world they have made it. They buy luxury cars, handbags, watches, etc.—the trappings that show society they have arrived. They are still very active in the day-to-day running of their affairs in terms of how and what they buy.
When you hit UHNW, your background is different. You have either inherited the money and therefore grown up in an environment where these trappings are seen as standard, or you are in the public eye, have sold a successful tech business, or have made money in finance.
Your interests are also different. At £30m+, you probably have an art collection, sit on the boards of charities, think about philanthropy, and want to leave your mark on the world by doing something good or different with your money. Not only this, but your environment is different. You will more than likely have a family office to manage your investments, life, and passions. Moreover, you don’t want society to notice you; your anonymity is important. Therefore, you build an environment where you travel by private jet and holiday on your superyacht because it’s more secure and avoids the intrusion of the press.
So, we can quickly see that their desires, values, passions, and networks are very different.
Therefore, we also need to be mindful of who our audience is for the brand we are working on. It’s far more than a curated picture and a good strapline or call to action—we need to understand their environments, and from this, we can build for and target the right people.
Luxury hospitality was cautious about social media for many years, partly from a fear that visibility, accessibility and mass reach could weaken exclusivity. Did that caution protect luxury brands, or has it left parts of the sector commercially behind?
I get asked this a lot and, I’m sorry to say, luxury brands are typically slower on digital uptake than other verticals. That said, I do understand that there is a sweet spot between digital visibility/commerciality and retaining brand integrity, and this is something we work with our clients on every day.
We have seen—and indeed, we talk about—how you can use social media as an engine to drive a business forward. Everything we do involves micro-targeting, not macro-targeting (which a typical agency might do).
We need to pinpoint wealthy audiences rather than drive mass visibility. We have a lot of data to support our targeting options, and we can be specific in who sees our brand and why, aligning with motivations that meet their needs.
Today, luxury hospitality is catching up, but there is still a lot of ground to cover compared to other sectors. Digitally, this is a very exciting space; this year alone, we have seen lots of new platform advances specifically tailored for hospitality. Brands should be looking to understand the commercial value this can bring to their business, while also helping them to reduce costs in other areas such as OTAs.
So, we can quickly see that desires, values, passions, and networks vary significantly.
Therefore, we also need to be mindful of who our audience is for the brand we are working on. It’s far more than a curated picture and a good strapline or call to action; we need to understand their environments, and from this, we can build for and target the right people.
You built Verb Brands into one of the UK’s leading luxury digital agencies before its acquisition by Croud, and later founded Giant Leap Digital. What did that journey teach you about what luxury brands genuinely need from an agency, as opposed to what agencies typically sell them?
You’re right—Giant Leap is designed from the ground up to be different and to combat some of the issues I saw when I worked in other agencies.
- We have a senior-only team. The brands we work with hold themselves to such high standards, and we need to do the same. Having a senior-only team means we hit the ground running from day one, offering greater leadership, productivity, and strategic support. This allows us to build strong relationships with our clients right away, which in turn builds trust and enables us to retain and grow client relationships over the medium and long term.
- The team you meet during the pitch is the team that delivers your project. This is of huge value to a client: you get to see the skills and expertise those people bring to your business from day one—no handovers, no delegation.
- We have zero burnout. I have worked in agencies where, because a relationship started poorly, the agency had to backfill resources and people ended up working extremely long hours to rebuild trust. This might work briefly, but unless the agency model is fundamentally structured differently, it will always fall into the same trap. This leads to burnout, loss of account history, disgruntled clients, and resources being pulled from other projects. Once that happens, it’s a one-way street.
I saw this time and again and thought it was ridiculous. It costs an agency huge amounts of time, money, and effort to win a new client, only to watch them walk out the door six months later—all because no one was willing to break the agency mould.
You have worked with brands including Corinthia Hotels, Almanac Hotels and Chenot. When you first examine a luxury hospitality business, what signals tell you that its marketing is capable of generating demand, and what signals suggest it is simply producing an expensive-looking image?
I’m speaking at the Hospitality Social Media Summit conference in September on this exact topic, so it’s a great question!
Social marketing in particular has changed. The idea that a pretty picture with a discount on it will drive sales for a luxury hotel… well, no. Actually, this probably does more damage than good, and yet, time and time again, hospitality brands fall into this trap—maintaining it simply because it’s the way it’s always been done.
The reality is that at the top end of the market, this audience isn’t as price-sensitive, so leading with an offer or discount is not the primary motivation for someone looking to stay.
setup today is more sophisticated and hungry for inspiration than ever before, and we need to meet that need. Just think about your own social journey: if you are shown an ad that inspires you for your next holiday or business trip, why would you go anywhere else? Ultimately, people are convenience-driven, and if we can tap into their motivations and show them how our hotel meets that need, they will convert.
Please come along to my session on day two of the conference, where I’ll share all about how we do this.
Paid social is one of the areas in which hospitality businesses can spend significant sums without understanding what has actually created a booking. Where does the failure usually begin: the audience, the creative, the offer, the booking journey, the measurement, or the strategy behind all of them?
Any one of these factors can cause a failure in a campaign’s objectives, which is why we need a clear strategy to start with. Sun Tzu famously said, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
It’s true—strategy has to come first. I have seen many campaigns pushed out the door to keep stakeholders happy, but if they haven’t been properly designed, the chance of success is limited.
When we start planning a campaign at Giant Leap, we don’t just look at one channel in isolation; we look at the wider marketing mix. These channels don’t operate independently, so we need to think through-the-funnel: Which audience are we talking to? Have we tapped into their motivations, and is our vision communicating this effectively? Is our creative right for the channel, and is it aligned with what we are doing in other areas? Do we have the right budget (not just the lowest) and targeting options in place across our channels? Have we ensured that we are measuring success with the right KPIs?
Affluent travellers rarely move through a simple journey from advertisement to booking. They may discover a property socially, validate it elsewhere, consult an adviser and return weeks later through another channel. How should hospitality businesses measure social’s influence when the path to revenue is neither immediate nor linear?
Yes, it’s complicated—that’s true. It’s also true that people use channels for all sorts of reasons other than generating sales. This goes back to the point above about having a clear strategy in place, ensuring the business understands why this is happening and the expected impact.
That said, if we are just looking at bookings from a particular channel, we can A/B test the impact. We need to create an environment where we are comparing apples to apples. For example, suppose we ran a campaign last summer with a 20% discount across programmatic, search, and social. We can look at the booking engine data to see what was generated over that period (because, as you noted, the conversion might happen in another channel, so we want to see the overall impact). We can then turn off a channel during the same period this year—provided the offer, media investment, and targeting remain identical.
While there will always be external factors we can’t account for—such as wars or droughts—this will give us as close a comparison as possible, and any mitigating factors can be explained around the results.
Social platforms reward reach, frequency and constant content, while luxury depends on discernment, restraint and a sense of rarity. How can a high-end hospitality brand participate fully in social media without becoming overexposed or indistinguishable from the mass market?
This is exactly what we want to avoid and lots of hospitality bands fall into the same trap- come and see me at the conference in September and I can run you through how to stand out and drive true engagement.
AI is changing how audiences are identified, creative is produced and campaigns are optimised. Where is it already creating a genuine performance advantage for luxury brands, and where does it risk removing the judgement, originality and emotional intelligence on which luxury depends?
While AI is transforming digital development, its undeniable power comes with a critical caveat: speed must never outpace governance.
Before rushing implementation, leaders must step back and establish clear framework policies—a step many organizations have overlooked. Critical factors like regulatory compliance, copyright, data ownership, brand integrity, and internal tool fragmentation need strategic oversight at the executive level before teams deploy unvetted AI solutions.
Furthermore, AI is far from a “fit and forget” solution. Advanced agentic systems demand rigorous, continuous curation.
At Giant Leap, AI is embedded into our daily processes to enhance program quality and accelerate delivery. However, this efficiency is anchored by absolute human oversight. No asset or output created by our tools ever reaches a client or the public without expert verification. In high-stakes industries like luxury, that human touch isn’t optional—it’s the foundation of trust.
Independent properties and smaller hospitality groups may assume that sophisticated luxury marketing requires the budgets and resources of a global brand. Which principles from the luxury playbook can they apply immediately, and which elements should they avoid trying to imitate?
For smaller brands, the first thing to get right is their owned media: creative, website, SEO/GEO, socials, CRM, and data/reporting. This is the most cost-effective place to start, and it has a strong impact on how your brand is represented and the commercial value it drives.
You don’t need big media spend to improve this area of your digital footprint. However, when we start working with a boutique hotel, this foundational activity has often been overlooked or deprioritised in favour of tactical paid campaigns.
Once this foundational work is in place, it’s important not to spread yourself too thin. It is far better to research where your audience lives online, identify the primary channel for their needs, and focus your efforts there, rather than trying to maintain a presence across all channels simultaneously. Once you have built a proven test case on one channel, you can use it as a framework for others.
Your Day 2 session at the Hospitality Social Media Summit is a 90-minute practical lab rather than a keynote or agency presentation. What will delegates work through with you, and what commercial decisions should they be better equipped to make by the end of the session?
At our heart, we are a performance agency, so the lens we apply to all our projects is: How can we drive commercial return from the investment in time, labour, and creativity?
Our Lab will look at the following:
- Which hotels are doing it well: We want to understand which hotels are driving the highest ADR from their grids.
- Buying behaviour: We’ll look at a bit of theory to understand consumer purchasing habits.
- Missing the mark vs. what good looks like: We’ll explore how hotels typically miss the mark when building campaigns—and what success actually looks like.
- Social to direct bookings: We’ll provide a framework for building stronger campaigns, alongside examples of both best practices and poor execution.
- Growth without compromising luxury: We’ll examine the role of our digital ecosystem and how to prevent luxury status from being diluted.
- Workshop: We are going to work on a fictional campaign for a top London hotel, covering our ecosystem, examining what works and how it could be done differently to drive maximum impact.
Lastly, we’ll give delegates take-home toolkits to help them structure their future campaigns more effectively.
Much of your most valuable knowledge would ordinarily sit inside agency strategy rooms and private conversations with luxury clients. What are you able to explore in a small working lab that would be impossible to communicate from a conventional conference stage?
My session will give lots of practical advice and highlight why things need to change. We are moving past high-level strategic landscaping and vision setting. This will be a “roll up your sleeves and let’s do this together” session, so attendees will leave with great case studies and practical workshops on how to apply these strategies when they get back to their desks.
After working with you in the lab, what should delegates be able to identify or assess in their own social strategy that they may not recognise today?
The Lab will be engaging and fun. It will be interactive and conversational – so please come along and attend. I’m hoping that by the end of the session, people will have seen how many luxury brands are getting social campaigns wrong—and why they need to pivot to meet the needs of today’s social audience. A lot has changed in recent years, and I will share the strategies, examples, tactics, and frameworks they can take away to make their social campaigns work harder, driving greater impact for both their community and their business’s bottom line.
The Hospitality Social Media Summit takes place live in London and online on 3–4 September 2026. Across two days, delegates work with award-winning global leaders to build practical social strategies, systems and assets designed specifically for hospitality.
To explore the programme, meet the faculty and secure your place, visit hospitalitysocialsummit.com.
