The Appointment

Crescent Hotels & Resorts has promoted Kristi Kastrounis to Senior Vice President of Digital Marketing, placing a seasoned hospitality eCommerce operator atop the company's corporate marketing function for a portfolio exceeding 120 upper-upscale and luxury properties across the United States and Canada.

In the expanded role, Kastrounis assumes oversight of digital marketing, eCommerce strategy, brand positioning, and commercial marketing initiatives — all directly tied to revenue performance for Crescent's ownership base, which includes REITs, private equity firms, and major developers. The appointment signals that Crescent is treating digital distribution and direct-channel optimization as boardroom-level priorities rather than operational back-office functions.

Digital Credentials

Kastrounis brings close to two decades of hospitality digital marketing experience, with prior leadership stints at Interstate Hotels & Resorts, Aimbridge Hospitality, and Hilton. At Hilton, she worked directly with the brand's largest management companies and ownership groups on commercial performance and digital channel strategy, advising brand-level initiatives that touched property-level revenue management and OTA mix optimization. That cross-functional background — spanning brand, owner, and operator perspectives — is increasingly rare and commercially valuable as hotel groups work to reduce OTA dependency and grow direct booking share.

Dawn Gallagher, President of Crescent Hotels & Resorts, framed the promotion in explicitly commercial terms: Kastrounis "knows how to turn that knowledge into results for our hotels and our owners." The framing reflects a broader industry shift in which digital marketing leaders are expected to own measurable RevPAR and direct-channel KPIs alongside traditional brand responsibilities.

Operator Impact

For a management company operating under the brand families of Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG — plus an independent lifestyle collection under the Latitudes umbrella — centralized digital marketing leadership carries significant complexity. Each brand family brings its own loyalty platform, channel manager rules, and co-op marketing requirements, making the SVP role as much a technology integration and data orchestration function as a creative one. Crescent's scale means Kastrounis will be coordinating eCommerce programs across dozens of PMS environments and loyalty ecosystems simultaneously.

Kastrounis also serves on HSMAI's Marketing Advisory Board and volunteers with HSMAI's Rising Leaders Council, positioning Crescent to stay closely aligned with emerging best practices in hospitality digital distribution and hotel-tech talent development.

The move is consistent with a broader pattern among large hotel management companies investing in dedicated digital and revenue management leadership as direct booking competition with OTAs intensifies and AI-driven personalization tools demand more sophisticated internal ownership.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.