Despite rising costs on everything from gas to groceries, U.S. consumers are still prioritizing travel this summer. While some consumers are traveling closer to home or choosing less expensive destinations to save money, about one-fifth are using loyalty points or rewards to keep costs low, according to a recent survey from the American Hotel & Lodging Association.
Hilton is doing its part to make loyalty easier: The hospitality titan last month launched a social-first campaign to dole out 1 billion Hilton Honors points. The effort kicked off in Instagram posts featuring Paris Hilton and Formula One star Lando Norris. The sweepstakes, which runs through July 30, is an opportunity for Hilton to tap into pop culture and consumer passions in an organic way. After all, who better to “give away” the points than the brand’s most famous ambassador and a driver whose McLaren Formula 1 Team has been partnered with Hilton for more than 20 years?
“It's taking their expertise and imparting it upon their fans,” Hilton Global CMO Mark Weinstein said of the effort. “It's a fun way to tap into the summer narrative that's out there, but also be back in culture and conversation, in a way that's authentic to who we are, versus just doing a bunch of giveaways.”
The effort spotlights a Hilton Honors program that has 260 million members and demonstrates how the marketer is approaching loyalty. While extra nights, free upgrades and experiential opportunities like the ones offered through new cruise partner Explora Journeys are key rewards in the program, loyalty is more emotional than transactional, Weinstein maintains.
“You wouldn't want the tenth bagel for free if the first nine weren't very good,” he said. “You don't win loyalty from earning points. You earn it from redeeming points. You don't earn it from earning tiers. You earn it from the value of the tiers being delivered.”
Hilton in Q2 2026 saw system-wide comparable revenue per available room, a key industry metric, increase 3.9% compared to the same period in 2025, per an earnings report released Tuesday. The company raised its outlook for annual revenue per available room growth to between 3% and 3.5%, with benefits from the World Cup in the third quarter being offset by the midterm elections in the fourth quarter.
“We're not in the commodity business,” the executive added. “We're in the irrational affinity business.”
Creators on a brand platform
Aside from famous brand ambassadors, Hilton has also leaned into the creator economy, which is on track to generate $44 billion in U.S. ad spending this year and is now a “core media channel,” according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Using creators requires brands like Hilton to give up control over its narrative in exchange for immediacy, Weinstein said.
“It doesn't always come out exactly how you would perfectly script it, but you're betting on the authenticity and the resonance that [creator content] has with their audience is enough of a benefit … that you're going to take that risk with your brand,” he said. “It can be a little nerve-wracking as a CMO and a brand leader.”
Hilton’s work with creators has developed alongside the evolution of the space. Early creator partners, including some micro-creators, were trying to make their own versions of TV commercials, perhaps due to brand briefs that were too prescriptive.
“If you want to be in those forums, you've got to trust creators to know their audience well enough to know how they'll best receive the message, and that means a little bit of tarnish sometimes,” Weinstein said.
The focus on trust is used whether dealing with a creator with 10,000 followers or 10 million followers, and it arrives as creator marketing continues to see a greater share of production and media budgets that were formerly reserved for traditional advertising. Weinstein attributes some of Hilton’s ability to cede creative control to the strength of its global brand platform, "For the Stay," that launched in 2022.
“That's why having a brand platform matters so much: because you're no longer trying to hit it out of the park every single time,” Weinstein said. “Content has never been cheaper to produce. The need to get people's attention has never been higher. If you can de-risk that environment, you actually hit some singles and doubles that turn into home runs.”
The role of AI evolves
As global CMO, Weinstein oversees brand and performance marketing for a portfolio of 28 brands totaling more than 9,200 hotels across 144 countries and territories. As expected, artificial intelligence is playing a role in helping Hilton meet its marketing imperatives. The tech is “rapidly transforming” Hilton’s ability to keep its inventory of rooms up-to-date, with accurate images and descriptions, so that it is bookable and advertisable, the executive said.
“We have a large team of people that supports that. They were always behind the eight ball when it comes to trying to have 1.3 million rooms up to date all the time. Having technology to scale that is quite impactful for us. Not just to automate it, but actually to use the AI capabilities to help us through that,” he explained.
AI is also bringing down the cost of performance marketing and giving Hilton the ability to generate thousands of variations on campaigns that can be more personalized and customized than ever — a necessity in a category where a brand can go from irrelevant to relevant in as little as 10 seconds, depending on consumer needs.
“When somebody books their hotel, that customer's gone, so our ability to use AI to respond in that moment to piece together the right asset, to ship it, to buy the media — that is a competitive game changer for sure,” Weinstein said.
Beyond content creation, the next frontier of AI is discoverability across tools that, in some cases, are replacing search as the gateway to travel planning. Already, more than one-third of Americans planning to travel this summer are using AI to help them plan their vacations, per Allianz’s Global Travel Confidence Index with polling from Ipsos.
“Suddenly, the user community talking about us sometimes matters more than our advertising,” Weinstein said, noting the importance of platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn and Wikipedia. “We have to recognize that we don't control the environment in which [our content] is consumed. It might be being shipped out to places where the LLMs are interpreting it, responding back to it.”
Hilton is testing advertising in the AI space, as well as learning the changing rules of the road where answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization join — and possibly supplant — search engine optimization. Between AI and creators, marketers like Hilton are quickly learning how to give up control.
“You've got to make sure you tell your narrative in a clear way, that you stay true to who you are, that you do what you've been doing before,” Weinstein explained. “You can't control a so-called funnel, you can't control a so-called linear process. It's being propagated all over the place. What's going to happen is going to happen.”
