AI Hotel CRM & Marketing
Sojern
SF 8.4AI travel marketing platform for hotels
Contact sales
AI Hotel CRM & Marketing
The Hotels Network
SF 8.6AI direct booking conversion for hotels
Contact sales
Quick decision guide
Choose based on your workflow
Sojern may fit better if...
- AI Targeting
- Programmatic Ads
- Metasearch Support
The Hotels Network may fit better if...
- AI Personalization
- Price Comparison
- Conversion Nudges
Overview
How each tool is described
Sojern
What is Sojern?
Sojern is a travel marketing platform that helps hotels, destinations, attractions, airlines, and other travel businesses reach travelers throughout the booking journey. It combines traveler data, audience targeting, digital advertising, campaign optimization, and guest engagement tools to help hospitality brands attract potential guests, increase direct bookings, and measure marketing performance.
- Traveler audience targeting: Sojern uses travel-specific data and behavioral insights to help brands identify and reach audiences based on factors such as travel intent, interests, booking behavior, and destination preferences.
- Digital advertising campaigns: the platform supports targeted campaigns across channels such as display, search, social, and other digital environments, helping travel businesses promote offers and reach potential customers during travel planning.
- Hospitality marketing workflows: hotels and travel brands can use Sojern’s tools for customer acquisition, direct booking campaigns, retargeting, and audience engagement rather than relying only on broad advertising platforms.
- Travel industry analytics: Sojern provides reporting and optimization capabilities that help marketers evaluate campaign performance, understand traveler engagement, and improve advertising decisions.
Sojern is most suitable for hospitality and travel organizations that need marketing technology built around traveler behavior and booking intent rather than general-purpose advertising tools.
The Hotels Network
What is The Hotels Network?
The Hotels Network (THN) is a hotel direct-booking and website-personalization platform that was acquired by Lighthouse in April 2025 and now forms part of Lighthouse’s broader commercial technology offering. THN focuses on converting more hotel website visitors through personalized messaging, predictive targeting, price comparison, direct-channel benchmarking, and newer AI-assisted guest acquisition tools.
- Website personalization: Hotels can create pop-up and inline campaigns, use more than 40 targeting options and triggers, compare their direct rates with OTAs, apply price-matching strategies when disparities appear, run A/B tests, and tailor website messages or offers to different visitor segments.
- Predictive personalization: Predictive Personalization uses hospitality-specific machine learning to assign visitors a value score based on their likelihood to book. Hotels can then target low-intent visitors with incentives, avoid unnecessary discounting for higher-intent users, or present different messages and upsell opportunities according to predicted booking behavior.
- Direct-channel intelligence: BenchDirect measures hotel website and booking-engine performance across areas including traffic, bookings and pickup, future demand, rates and disparities, and visitor behavior. It also benchmarks performance against market and competitor data and includes THN-specific measures such as the DirectBookingIndex.
- AI guest acquisition and service: KITT is an AI receptionist that handles hotel questions and booking-related conversations across channels including phone, webchat, WhatsApp, and email. Connect AI addresses a different stage of the journey by helping hotels make brand-controlled content, live rates, availability, and direct-booking paths available through AI travel discovery, including Lighthouse’s direct-booking experience inside ChatGPT.
The Hotels Network is most relevant to properties with meaningful direct website traffic that want to improve conversion, reduce unnecessary discounting, benchmark direct-channel performance, and extend their direct-booking presence into AI-assisted travel discovery. Buyers should also consider how THN’s capabilities fit within the wider Lighthouse platform rather than evaluating it only as a standalone hotel marketing product.
Side-by-side
Key differences
Criteria
AI Hotel CRM & MarketingSojern
AI Hotel CRM & MarketingThe Hotels Network
Best for
AI Hotel CRM & Marketing
AI Hotel CRM & Marketing
Score
8.4/10
8.6/10
Pricing
Contact sales
Contact sales
Category / audience
AI Hotel Management & Operations Software › AI Hotel CRM & Marketing
- hotel marketing
- travel advertising
- AI targeting
AI Hotel Management & Operations Software › AI Hotel CRM & Marketing
- website personalization
- direct booking
- hotel marketing
Feature check
Side-by-side feature check
Feature
Sojern
The Hotels Network
AI TargetingUses traveler intent for audience selection
-
Programmatic AdsRuns hotel display and video campaigns
-
Metasearch SupportSupports hotel visibility across search channels
-
Guest EngagementCovers pre-stay and post-stay marketing
-
Campaign AnalyticsMeasures performance across travel marketing channels
-
Managed ServiceProvides campaign help for hotel marketers
-
12 capabilities compared.12 differentiating rows are shown first.
Use cases
Who they're built for
Sojern
- Run hotel digital advertising campaignsReach travelers using AI-powered intent data for hotel teams
- Increase direct demand for propertiesDrive bookings outside purely OTA-dependent channels for hotel teams
- Support hotels without ad specialistsUse managed services for campaign execution support for hotel teams
The Hotels Network
- Improve hotel website booking conversionPersonalize direct booking journeys for website visitors for hotel teams
- Reduce dependence on OTA bookingsShow value and rate transparency for direct channels
- Test booking messages and offersRun experiments across key website conversion moments for hotel teams
The trade-offs
Pros & cons of each tool
Trade-offs
Sojern
Pros
- Travel-specific audience data supports better targeting
- Managed service helps lean hotel marketing teams
- Strong hospitality adoption and RateGain backing clearly
Cons
- Campaign value depends on meaningful ad budget
- Not a replacement for hotel CRM tools
- Pricing and media spend require careful scoping
Trade-offs
The Hotels Network
Pros
- Direct booking focus is very clear clearly
- AI personalization supports higher website conversion clearly
- Lighthouse ownership may expand commercial context clearly
Cons
- Low website traffic limits measurable value clearly
- Active testing is needed for best returns
- Roadmap may shift under Lighthouse packaging clearly
Final verdict
Best fit depends on your workflow
Current catalog data shows meaningful overlap between Sojern and The Hotels Network. Use the signals below to decide based on workflow, ecosystem, pricing, and implementation fit.
Differentiators available
Sojern has 4 visible decision signals and The Hotels Network has 4.
Score signal
The Hotels Network has the higher SoftFinders Score in the current catalog data.
Choose Sojern if…
- Run hotel digital advertising campaigns
- Increase direct demand for properties
- Support hotels without ad specialists
- AI Targeting
Choose The Hotels Network if…
- Improve hotel website booking conversion
- Reduce dependence on OTA bookings
- Test booking messages and offers
- AI Personalization
TRY THEM YOURSELF
See which one fits your workflow
Both tools have their strengths, the best way to decide is to spend a few minutes inside each.