Marketing Agency vs. In-House: a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis

When a hotel owner in Thailand asks me, “Why should I pay an agency when I can hire someone in-house?”, they’re usually thinking in one simple equation:

“Monthly retainer vs. monthly salary.”

That’s a natural instinct, salary is obvious, neat and sits in the P&L. But it’s also the wrong way to compare. In hotels we budget and decide in terms of assets and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): we evaluate a kitchen not just by the chef’s pay, but by running costs, maintenance, downtime, and output. The same financial logic must be applied to marketing.

If you reframe the choice as a TCO decision rather than a headline salary decision, the economics change profoundly. Over the next few thousand words I’ll walk through the practical, measurable costs hotels in Thailand actually experience when they choose the single-hire in-house route, and how those compare to retaining a specialist agency that already carries tooling, depth and redundancy. 

I’ll use Thai market numbers and regional benchmarks wherever possible so this is useful for GMs, asset managers and owners based here.

1. The iceberg beneath the salary: the real financial math

When people quote a salary, “THB 1,200,000 per year”, they stop too soon. The real, burdened cost to you as a hotel operator is often significantly higher.

In Phuket, market data shows senior digital marketing managers commonly sit in the region of roughly THB 1.2 to 1.6 million per year (and this can be even higher for truly senior performance specialists). For reference, some salary surveys for Phuket report averages around THB 1.4M/year for a digital marketing manager role.

Beyond gross salary you must add:

• Employer contributions, payroll taxes and social security.
• Provident fund or pension top-ups where applicable.
• Health benefits, bonuses or performance pay.
• Hardware, workstation, mobile, desk space and local IT support.
• Software licences (more on that below).
• The recruitment cost to find that person (a recruiter fee or advertising, interview time, HR overhead).

Recruitment agencies in Thailand commonly charge a percentage of the candidate’s first-year salary, typically around 20–25% for permanent hires depending on role complexity. That is material: on a THB 1.4M hire, you may pay THB 300k+ in recruiter fees.

Finally, we must bake in turnover. The marketing and creative labour market is fluid; turnover in the industry increases replacement cycles and costs. Conservative HR estimates put replacement/turnover cost at 50–200% of a role’s annual salary depending on seniority and role complexity, partly because you pay to recruit, lose productivity during onboarding, and suffer opportunity cost while the new hire learns the hotel. Even at the low end, that’s a very large number to ignore.

All of the above means a “THB 1.4M salary” commonly translates into THB 1.7–2.0M+ in true TCO during the first year, and recurring add-ons across subsequent years (training, software renewals, recruitment should turnover occur).

2. The Unicorn fallacy: one human cannot be expert at everything

Hoteliers commonly look for a “Digital Marketing Manager” who can do SEO, run Google Ads, craft social content, design creative, manage email CRM flows, and report on analytics. That job description is actually the description of a team, not a single person.

In practical terms: depth matters. Paid search and programmatic campaigns require a specialist mindset, structure, conversion tracking, bidding strategies, creative testing and day-to-day optimisation. SEO requires technical audits, content planning and long-term editorial work. CRM and automation demand both copywriting skill and integration with PMS/booking engines. Design and video demand entirely different tooling and production skills.

If your single in-house hire is brilliant at content and social but inexperienced with paid media, the hotel will leak money in ad accounts for months before the problem is obvious. That leakage, wasted ad spend and lost opportunity, is often larger than the headline salary.

An agency, by contrast, brings a multi-disciplinary hive mind: strategist, paid specialist, SEO lead, copywriter, designer and traffic analyst. For the price of one senior annual salary you gain a full set of specialists. The team approach reduces the “cost of mediocre” in any one channel.

3. The technology tax: enterprise tools don’t come cheap

A modern hotel’s marketing stack is not a single app. It’s a collection of specialist tools and platforms. Agencies absorb tool costs across clients; an in-house hire usually requires you to pay full single-seat licences. Typical line items include:

• SEO & market intelligence: SEMrush / Ahrefs / similar (SEMrush’s entry plans are in the USD 150–165/month range). If you convert to THB at today’s market rates (~THB 31 / USD), that is roughly THB 4,600–5,200/month for a single seat on a professional plan.
• Creative tools: Adobe Creative Cloud single licences are sold in THB on Adobe’s Thai site, expect several thousand baht per user per month depending on plan. Cheaper alternatives like Canva are available, but still add monthly cost.
• Social scheduling & reporting: enterprise scheduling and analytics platforms easily run THB 3–6k/month per seat for professional plans.
• Email/CRM platforms: depending on volume, you’d be looking at several thousand baht per month for a robust hotel CRM or for higher-tier Klaviyo/Mailchimp plans.
• Analytics dashboards, data connectors and project management tools: add more recurring licence costs.

Conservatively, equipping an in-house marketer with a modern stack can add THB 60k–120k+ per year in software alone. That is without proper training and implementation time.

Agencies amortise these costs across clients; they bring both licences and experienced users. The agency option is therefore less about “saving on tools” and more about avoiding the operational debt of implementing and maintaining that stack internally.

4. Management burden — who watches the watchmen?

A small but very real cost is the time a General Manager or hotel operator spends managing the marketer.

Most GMs are experts in guest operations, housekeeping, F&B and asset upkeep, not in Google Ads attribution windows or the latest search algorithm nuance. When you put a digital professional on your payroll, management doesn’t become “set and forget.” Someone within the hotel must:

• Approve budgets and creative assets
• Review monthly performance and interrogate reports
• Conduct performance appraisals and manage leave
• Handle HR issues and career development

That managerial time has an opportunity cost. If a GM spends two hours per week supervising marketing work, that’s time away from revenue-driving operational decisions. Those hours should be included in your TCO calculation.

Agencies reduce that supervision burden: they bring SLAs, external performance KPIs, and transparent reporting designed for GMs who want clear answers, not technical tutorials.

5. Continuity, redundancy and the bus factor

Hotels operate seven days a week. Staff take leave, fall ill, resign, get promoted or move to other islands. What happens to your campaigns when your only marketer is on leave? Or worse, hands in resignation without notice?

That’s the “bus factor”, the risk of single-point failure. With an in-house single hire, the bus factor is high. With an agency, account teams and resourcing plans mean coverage is baked in: someone steps in, campaigns continue, reporting stays consistent. For a revenue channel, continuity is not just convenience, it’s protection of yield.

6. Seasonality and scalability — fixed cost vs. variable performance

Hotels in Thailand are cyclical. Peak season needs more marketing horsepower and creative refreshes. Shoulder season needs smart targeting and yield management.

An employee is a fixed cost year-round. Agencies are, by design, more flexible: you can scale up activity and paid budgets in high season and reallocate effort in low season, adjusting retainer or project scope without hiring/firing cycles. For hotels, the ability to flex spend and intensity against demand is valuable and directly improves ROI.

7. Performance opportunity cost — the insight advantage

Perhaps the most important, and least intellectually ‘sexy’, point is this: agencies see more data.

An in-house marketer only sees your hotel’s data. An agency sees data across dozens (or hundreds) of properties, markets and campaigns. That breadth allows them to spot early trends, new creative formats that work, shifts in channel economics, or booking window shifts driven by nearby flight capacity, often months before an in-house marketer would. Those insights translate to first-mover advantage in campaigns and rates.

Speed of execution matters. A well-prepared agency can mobilise a Black Friday creative and acquisition funnel in hours; an in-house function often needs weeks. That speed, compounded over multiple seasons, adds measurable revenue.

An illustrative TCO table

Below is an illustrative first-year comparison for a mid-sized Phuket hotel. These are example figures, use your true P&L to model your situation, but the structure is the critical takeaway.

When a hire still makes sense (and how to make it work)

I don’t want to be ‘doctrinaire’. In-house can be the right call when:

• You have multiple properties and need dedicated, embedded resources across the group.
• The role is narrowly defined (e.g., content coordinator, CRM specialist) with clear KPIs and a senior commercial lead who understands digital.
• You are prepared to invest in tools, training and build a small team (not just one “unicorn”).

If you decide to hire, treat the position like a proper asset build, budget for training, licences, recruitment cycles and contingency. Build documented SOPs and ensure the person has a strong mentor (commercial/GM) who understands marketing ROI.

Final thoughts — the pragmatic recommendation

For independent hotels and small groups in Thailand, I most often recommend a hybrid operating model.

Use a specialist agency to handle paid media, SEO strategy, CRO, and seasonal campaign execution, areas that are highly technical, scale-dependent, and directly linked to revenue performance. At the same time, retain a lean in-house role focused on guest communications, internal coordination, local partnerships, and on-property content capture.

This structure significantly reduces Total Cost of Ownership while preserving brand control and operational alignment. You gain specialist depth where it matters most, without carrying the full fixed cost and risk of a large internal marketing team.

At The Percentage Company, we deliberately structure our partnerships differently from traditional agencies. We charge a small, transparent monthly management fee — not a retainer — and we align the majority of our remuneration to performance and commission.

That means we invest alongside our hotel partners. We shoulder much of the operational, technology, and execution cost because we are confident in our ability to deliver results. We do not believe hotels should carry all the cost and all the risk while agencies simply invoice. Our success is directly tied to yours.

Our objective is simple: to be a commercial asset, not an overhead. We focus on increasing RevPAR, lowering blended Cost of Acquisition, strengthening direct demand, and protecting long-term profitability, particularly in low season and lower-demand periods, when cash flow and efficiency matter most.

If you are a GM or hotel owner/operator in Phuket or anywhere in Thailand and want to explore a low-risk, performance-aligned marketing partnership, get in touch with The Percentage Company today.

Let’s look at the numbers together, and build a model where we succeed only when your hotel does.