In my opinion, neither of these strategies is very good.

Redirecting domains like the marketer suggests will offer no benefit, SEO or otherwise.

Building content on an exact-match domain could work, but why not just try to rank for those exact match terms on the main site? Getting the new domains to rank may still take a good amount of work. If searchers do click through to those sites, they're still going to have to click again to get to the main site. This could be simplified by just doing a good job to bring searchers to the main site directly.

Is it possible to generate an XML sitemap for a site without PHP? If so, how?

I agree with Alan. Ideally the blog is on the same domain at a location like you suggested (hotelassetsgroup.com/blog). Having an a domain with the keywords are targeting is often helpful, but it's not the end all, be all for ranking for that or other key terms.

Check out this other thread, which is along the same lines: http://www.seomoz.org/q/which-is-better-for-linkbuilding-internal-or-external-blog

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I think you're right that Google has discounted the value of exact match domains now as it's not as easy to increase rankings solely on the merit of the domain alone. However, I don't agree that exact match domains aren't helpful at all anymore. I see cases all the time where exact match domains are very higher in search rankings in Google. Value of having the exact match domain may be "dying," but I wouldn't say it's dead yet. If this is a new domain with no domain authority, it does you no help to simply redirect from that domain to yours regardless of how good the keywords in the new domain are. At minimum you would need to build up the new domain to get any value out of it (unless you you want to buy the domain just to ensure competitors don't get a hold of it).