Director of Marketing QHotels

Bringing hotels to market with QHotels

Following my time at Paramount Hotels, I was approached in 2007 to join the team behind its success as they launched a new, venture capitalist-backed hotel group: QHotels.

This wasn’t just another hotel brand, it was a fast-growing business built through acquisition, with ambitious plans and a team I already knew and trusted.

A familiar team, a new challenge

Many of the people behind QHotels were the same team who had built Paramount. That made the move a natural one.

But the brief was different.

QHotels was growing quickly, acquiring properties across the UK, each with its own identity, systems and challenges. My role was to bring these hotels into the group and shape how they were positioned, presented and marketed from day one.

Growing through acquisition

As new hotels joined the portfolio, the priority was speed and consistency.

Each property needed to be:

• Integrated into the QHotels brand
• Brought up to standard across all marketing channels
• Positioned correctly for its local market
• Ready to generate revenue quickly

This meant working across multiple teams including general managers, sales, revenue and central functions to ensure every hotel was commercially ready as soon as it came on board. Importantly, the teams we were acquiring with each property had to be welcomed and trained in often a very different way of working. Sensitivity and staff motivation was as key as the procedures I was implementing.

Building structure at pace

With rapid expansion comes complexity.

My role was to bring structure to that growth:

• Aligning new properties with brand standards
• Developing consistent marketing materials and messaging
• Supporting sales teams with the tools they needed to convert business
• Ensuring each hotel was visible, bookable and competitive in its market

In addition, I was responsible for driving the group-wide short break revenue and establishing a new loyalty club to buld repeat business.

Commercial focus from day one

As with Paramoutn Hotels, QHotels’ marketing wasn’t about theory, it was about results.

Every new property needed to contribute to room revenue, conference and corporate sales, weddings and leisure or golf business.

The focus was always on making each hotel commercially effective as quickly as possible, balancing brand consistency with local opportunity.

A foundation for what came next

My time at QHotels built on everything I’d learned at Paramount, but in a faster-moving, very commercially driven environment.

It sharpened my ability to work across multiple properties at scale, bring clarity to complex growing businesses, deliver marketing that drives revenue, not just awareness – skills that continue to shape the way I work with hotels today.

I worked with QHotels for two years and left when I had my second child, after which I launched myself into the career of hotel freelance marketing.