Hotel Email Reachability in Europe: 25-City Benchmark Report 2026

Most analyses of hotel sourcing focus on what happens after a hotel replies. Pricing, attrition, comp rooms. The data below moves the analysis one step earlier, to whether the invite reaches the property at all. We pulled a snapshot of 15,797 active European hotels and counted how many have a verified, deliverable email on file, broken down by 25 cities. The pattern is sharper than expected.

Why this measurement matters more than reply rate alone

If you have ever looked at an industry report claiming a 22 percent average hotel reply rate to RFPs and wondered whether that number applies to your sourcing patterns, the answer is almost always no. Reply rate as a single number conflates two different things: how reachable a hotel is, and how willing a reachable hotel is to engage. They behave differently and require different fixes.

A planner sourcing a 200-person leadership offsite in London who only sees a 12 percent reply rate often blames the brief, the timing, or the platform. The data below suggests a more boring explanation. In London, a substantial share of the property addresses circulating in industry databases simply do not deliver mail. The invites disappear before any human at the hotel could choose to ignore them.

The opposite mistake is also common. A planner sourcing in Berlin sees a 35 percent reply rate and concludes the platform or the brief is exceptional. It might be. Or it might be that Berlin hotels publish their MICE inbox more reliably than London hotels do, so the same platform and the same brief reach more humans there. Without correcting for reachability, you cannot tell the two stories apart.

Top 25 European cities by verified hotel email reachability

The table below shows the percentage of hotels in each city with at least one verified, deliverable email on file, ordered from highest reachability to lowest. The third column is the absolute count of reachable hotels, which is the number that matters operationally when you are picking a shortlist size. A 30 percent reachability in a city with 500 hotels gives you 150 reachable properties to invite, which is more than enough for any RFP. A 50 percent reachability in a city with 40 hotels gives you 20 reachable properties, which is enough only for the most flexible briefs.

Source: Easy RFP database snapshot, 28 April 2026. Coverage = hotels with at least one verified primary or candidate email divided by total active hotels in the city. Updated weekly.

Three patterns worth naming

1. German MICE cities lead, southern Mediterranean cities lag

Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg span the full range. The first three sit at 32 to 54 percent reachability, which is the highest band in our index. Hamburg, despite being a major business city, sits at 0 percent in this snapshot. The pattern is real but the explanation is partly an artefact of which Hamburg hotels we currently index. The tier-A Hamburg hotels we cover are mostly chains that route through central reservation systems without exposing per-property addresses.

Southern Mediterranean cities such as Seville show a similar problem at the small end. With 156 indexed properties and zero verified emails, Seville is operationally unsourceable through email-only outreach today. Booking.com or DMC partnerships are the only fast path until we complete the next enrichment cycle.

2. London is a rich market and an unreachable one at the same time

1,966 hotels indexed, only 232 reachable. That is the largest absolute pool of hotels of any city in our database, and one of the lowest reachability percentages. The structural reason is that the most attractive London corporate properties are concentrated under a handful of luxury and lifestyle groups that route all enquiries through central business development teams. Hotel-level addresses are deliberately not published. Sourcing in London works, but it requires either accepting a smaller direct-reach pool, working through a venue-finding agency for the central-reservations properties, or paying for an enriched contact database.

This is why our London city guide and the London venue page emphasise direct-reach properties first. The 232 hotels we can reliably contact already cover most credible MICE shortlists for offsites under 300 attendees.

3. Paris is the workhorse

Paris contributes 2,446 indexed hotels, 741 reachable, and a 30 percent coverage rate. That is the largest absolute reachable pool in Europe, comfortably ahead of London despite a lower percentage. For planners running multi-city RFPs, Paris is the city that quietly carries reply-rate benchmarks because the sample is so large that it absorbs the long tail of unreachable properties without distorting the average.

What this means for your next RFP

Three concrete adjustments to standard sourcing practice come out of this benchmark.

First, calibrate expected reply rate by city, not by global average. If you are sourcing in Berlin and you see a 35 percent reply rate, the platform is performing at industry baseline, not exceeding it. If you are sourcing in London and see 8 percent, you are not failing. You are hitting the structural ceiling of an unreachable city, and the fix is to widen the shortlist or add a phone follow-up step.

Second, build the shortlist around reachable hotels first. If a city has 500 indexed hotels and 30 percent reachability, that is 150 hotels you can reliably invite. Including the unreachable 350 in the initial brief just inflates the platform's invitation count without adding response capacity. Most planners do not realise their invitation pool was already capped by reachability before the platform even tried to send.

Third, separate reply-rate analysis from response-quality analysis. A hotel that replies but quotes 30 percent above market is a different kind of problem than a hotel that does not reply. Both inflate sourcing time. Treating both as a single bucket leads to the wrong conclusions about which platform or which DMC is performing.

How we collected this data

Where to go from here

If you are running an RFP this quarter and want to see the real reachable count for the cities you care about before you commit, you can create a Starter account at no cost and use the city filter on the hotel database to view the live numbers per city. Reachability is shown next to every city in the database, and the filter lets you build a shortlist from reachable properties only.

If you would rather see the methodology in a longer-form analysis, our Hotel RFP Reply Rate Benchmark 2026 covers the second half of the funnel, from invite delivered to proposal returned. The two reports together give the full picture of where your sourcing time goes and which cities deserve more or less of it.

The next benchmark update is scheduled for August 2026, after the May enrichment cycle. We will publish the diff so the cities that improved are visible, with a note on what changed.