Most hotels picture their best gift buyer as a romantic partner choosing an anniversary treat. The data points somewhere else entirely: businesses. When we separated consumer buyers from business buyers across ~100,000 voucher purchases in our five APAC markets, one segment stood out on every measure that matters: size, order value and loyalty. And almost no hotel has a single person responsible for it.
A Third of the Revenue, Hiding in Plain Sight
Buyers using a genuine business email account, with free providers and hotel-staff addresses stripped out, accounted for roughly a third of all paid gifting revenue. That is about US$3.2M of a US$10M dataset, spread across 7,811 buyers from more than 6,000 companies. Thousands of businesses quietly buy hotel gifts, and together they fund a third of the whole programme.
Their headcount understates them, because they do not buy like consumers. A business buying gifts is running a gift project: client thank-yous, staff rewards, an incentive programme, an end-of-year batch. One buyer, many vouchers, repeated. That behaviour is invisible if you only look at order counts, and it is exactly why the segment is so easy to overlook.
They Spend More, and They Come Back
The corporate order is materially bigger and materially stickier. The average business order ran about US$333 against US$225 for everyone else, roughly 50% larger. And 12% of corporate buyers came back for another purchase, against 8.8% of consumers. Bigger baskets, more often. The heaviest accounts in the data placed dozens of separate orders each.
| Measure | Consumer buyers | Corporate buyers |
|---|---|---|
| Average order value | US$225 | US$333 |
| Repeat purchase rate | 8.8% | 12% |
| Share of paid revenue | ~68% | ~32% |
Source: order-level analysis of de-duplicated paid purchases, APAC, 2025. Corporate = business email domain, excluding free providers and hotel-staff addresses.
Read those rows the way a commercial lead would. A buyer worth 50% more per order, who returns more often, is the buyer you build a programme around. In most hotels, that buyer is handled by whoever happens to pick up the enquiry email.
The Revenue Spreads Across Thousands of Accounts, Which Makes It Scalable
A reasonable worry about any "a third of revenue" segment is concentration: lose two big accounts and the line collapses. The data says the opposite. The top 100 corporate accounts made up only about 17% of corporate spend. This is thousands of businesses buying steadily, and no small cluster of giants is propping up the number. That makes the segment scalable, the kind of base you can grow deliberately without betting the line on a single relationship.
It also has a clear geography. Corporate spend concentrated in Australia and Singapore, and the names at the top were telling: banks and insurers featured heavily, alongside rewards and incentive platforms and a spread of ordinary corporates. That points straight at the highest-value play, selling gift cards and stays into banks, insurers and rewards platforms as a tiered-reward currency.
A Warm List You Already Own
Here is the part most groups do not realise they are sitting on. A subset of these corporate accounts were sold directly by hotel teams, outside the self-service storefront: around 160 accounts worth roughly US$326k across 34 properties, concentrated in Singapore luxury. Those are existing relationships, businesses a hotel has already transacted with at volume. A deliberate B2B motion can start warm, by going back to the accounts the hotels already won by accident.
Corporate Gifting Is the Clearest Growth Lever in the Data
Put it together. Corporate gifting is already a third of revenue, spends half as much again per order, repeats more, spreads across thousands of accounts rather than a risky few, and comes with a warm list the hotels already hold. And it is won one buyer at a time, with no dedicated programme, no bulk-ordering flow, no account management. Most corporate enquiries today become a manual scramble or a quietly lost sale.
The fix is to treat it as a channel and stop running it as a series of favours. That means a real corporate-gifting offer: bulk and volume vouchers, simple reordering, an account owner, priced and merchandised for business buyers, with banks and rewards platforms as the first target because that is where the value already clusters. Gift cards and stays carry the value and redeem reliably, which makes them an ideal reward currency: predictable, low-breakage, easy to issue at scale.
Start With an Owner, Easy Bulk Buying, and the Warm List
You do not need a finished B2B platform to capture this. You need three things in sequence.
First, give it an owner. One named person, at property or group level, accountable for corporate gifting revenue, with a target attached. The single biggest reason the segment underperforms is that it currently belongs to no one.
Second, make the buying easy for a business. That means a way to order in volume without a back-and-forth email chain, a simple reorder path for the accounts that come back, and an invoice option, because a procurement team cannot always put a bulk order on a personal card. The friction that a consumer tolerates will lose you a corporate order outright.
Third, go back to the warm list before you chase cold ones. Start with the accounts your hotels have already sold to directly, then widen toward the highest-value cluster the data points at: banks, insurers and rewards platforms in Australia and Singapore. Lead with gift cards and named stays, the products that carry value and redeem cleanly, and pitch them as a reward currency, the kind of thing a business issues at scale.
So Who Owns It?
The uncomfortable question for your next commercial review is short. Who in your group is accountable for corporate gifting revenue, by name?
If the honest answer is nobody, then a third of your gifting line is running on luck and goodwill, and the warmest, highest-value buyers you have are being served worse than your walk-in consumers.
Want to find the corporate accounts already sitting in your gifting data? Book a Ryse demo and we will pull them out with you.
