Insights Type: White Papers

Planning for Hospitality Sales Recovery

During economic downturns, it’s more important than ever to keep your sales team motivated, engaged, and empowered as you navigate towards recovery. Reopening to your local markets and then to the broader market will put an emphasis on new skills and lines of communication. The following strategies will help you capture as much from the reopening process as possible:

Keep in touch. It’s critical to maintain regular communication with anyone that you may be hiring (or rehiring) soon. Even if they are not on-property yet, it’s essential to make your future colleagues feel valued and part of your business plan to move forward.

Invest in learning new skills. This recovery will demand new skills from your sales team. With such a sharp drop in demand and restrictions on physical meetings, the sales environment of the recovery will reward those who can prospect digitally. Provide training plans that will allow the team to develop the skills they need, such as digital relationship building, consultative selling, or software training. View this as an investment that will reward you as the market continues to build.

Formalize information sharing between sales and other teams. Sales teams need to be intimately familiar with new pricing strategies, technology investments, operational changes, and community developments. Formalize cross-functional communications between sales and the rest of the organization.

Position sales as intelligence collectors for the property. Sales teams are your eyes and ears into a changing world. Let your sales teams do what they are trained to do (building relationships, networking, and understanding customer needs), and elevate their insights to property decision makers.

Excerpted from Planning for Hospitality Recovery – Sales, a new resource guide available from HSMAI and Amadeus. For additional information, insights, and tools, visit HSMAI’s Global Coronavirus Resources page.

Marketing Content in the Post-COVID Marketplace

By Kathleen A. Cullen, Senior Vice President, PHG Consulting

Hotel marketers are already thinking about creative new campaigns to help capture travelers once coronavirus-related restrictions are lifted. Some hoteliers have continued communicating with guests to keep them informed of the hotel’s status and provide relevant, fun programming, while others are waiting until they get closer to reopening.

Marketing campaigns will have to be timed appropriately to ensure alignment with a consensus that it’s safe to travel again. Yes, consumers will be looking for deals, but more importantly, they will want hotels that provide them with a sense of health and cleanliness. Now is the time for marketers to review content on all channels and all forms of communication to ensure that it is being presented from an entirely new perspective:

  • Should your hotel consider a new section on its website that addresses healthy and safe business practices? Legal counsel should be considered.
  • Review hotel imagery through an entirely new lens. Should hotels start including images representing cleanliness or the sanitation process? Also, displaying groups of people close together may not be ideal to lead with anymore.
  • Are your reservation sales agents — onsite and call center — armed and ready to speak to safety, cleanliness, and spacing concerns?
  • Communicate how your hotel is transforming its physical spaces to accommodate more room in public areas.
  • Consider written content on all channels. Ensure that content on channels such as website, GDS, and OTAs represents the right descriptions of any new safety practices, change of services, and amenities.
  • Have the check-in and checkout processes been revised to allow less human interaction or touchpoints? If so, make sure that this is being communicated in all areas.

Excerpted from New Rules to Be Market Ready, by Kathleen A. Cullen, a new white paper available from HSMAI and PHG Consulting. For additional information, insights, and tools, visit HSMAI’s Global Coronavirus Resources page.

COVID-19 & The Hotel Industry Worldwide

HSMAI Asia Pacific and RateGain special report focusing on the impact and the coping strategy for the hotels across the globe.

This study is a detailed representation of the answers to the key questions being asked by hoteliers:

  • How’s the epidemic impacting the hotel bookings in a particular country or a region?
  • Are the cancellations up?
  • What advise do the experts have to give to the hotels? And much more..


Access Report

The Future of Pricing

Since its inception in the late 90s and early 2000s, pricing and revenue management has become a key function in hospitality. In the early days of revenue management, revenue managers focused on inventory optimization, opening and closing pre-set rates according to demand to ensure the best possible utilization of the limited capacity of hotel rooms. Today, a dynamic distribution marketplace allows consumers review all the prices in the market, making pricing a critical focus for revenue management.

Evolutions in the digital space, and related technical and analytics advancements, continue to drive revenue management practices and systems forward. It is clear that the future of pricing in hospitality is data, automation, and analytics. The only question is how to best automate to align with your market and strategy. In this paper we explore the current state of revenue management and the approaches used by revenue management systems (RMS) to support hotel revenue management. We also explore new trends in revenue management systems and analytics that are shaping the future today. Finally, recognizing that revenue management technology is not a “one size fits all” product, we make recommendations regarding RMS approaches and trends that hoteliers should consider, based on their specific market and strategy.

Read the full report from HSMAI Europe by Kelly A. McGuire and Alex Dietz

 

Shifting From a Transactional Mindset

What do you do when you’ve spent the last 10 years taking inbound leads for granted — and you’re facing the possibility of an economic slowdown? Pivot to proactive selling. A new white paper from HSMAI and Knowland, Finding the ‘Right’ Group Business, explains how. Read an excerpt below:

This proactive strategy — centered on smart, data-driven outreach — should be the new normal. For many hotels, it means a shift from a transactional mindset to one of business development, in which salespeople are focused on the long game. This can pay huge dividends down the line, when your team doesn’t have to scramble to keep up with potentially irrelevant leads.

For relatively smaller brands, such as Rosewood Hotel Group, proactive selling allows for a more consultative approach, especially as it looks at overall long-term spend. Thanks to powerful intelligence on its potential customer needs, Rosewood Senior Corporate Director of Global Sales SiuYin Ko’s team is able to have more candid conversations with key clients about how best to secure more business. “We can also have honest conversations when there isn’t a fit,” Ko said, “so that we can be respectful of their time.”

Through this model, traditional sales roles become a thing of the past. Already, some hotel companies are testing an overhaul of their teams. Take Prism Hotels & Resorts, where an upcoming beta change to the sales-organizational structure will see sales managers dedicated to proactive selling and administrators redeployed to respond to inbound leads.

“Was it broken before? Absolutely not,” said Allison Handy, Prism’s senior vice president of sales, marketing, and revenue optimization. “But success in this market is about strategic changes you can make for incremental improvements, and this is one of them.”

The Power of Proactive Selling

What do you do when you’ve spent the last 10 years taking inbound leads for granted — and you’re facing the possibility of an economic slowdown? Pivot to proactive selling. A new white paper from HSMAI and Knowland, Finding the Right Group Business, explains how. Read an excerpt below:

While meeting and events are among the many sectors that have benefited from a robust economy over the last 10 years, offering hotels a brisk pace of business and relative ease in making their group sales targets, signs now point to an inevitable slowdown in the U.S. hotel industry. Occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR have all grown in 2019, for example, but the numbers are below previous projections for the year. And with an over-supply in new-hotel construction creating a glut of rooms, the group sales process could become quite a bit more difficult. Hotels realize that their current group strategy, with salesforces simply trying to keep up with an onslaught of inbound requests, might not be up to the challenge.

With this nearly decade-long strong economy “we find that our sales approach is far more ‘catch and close’ versus prospecting,” said Lori Kiel, chief revenue and marketing officer for The Kessler Collection. This has meant that her team has had to travel less and deploy more of its resources responding to inbound leads. But the tides are shifting, and Kiel is already seeing a slowing in transient demand in 2019. “We have moved our group mix up at all of our hotels to make up the difference,” she said.

So why hinge success on market conditions? Why not set up your hotel to outperform the competition in all economic times? To do that, you need a proactive group sales strategy. Selling group directly and proactively is a paradigm shift in which salespeople pivot from simply focusing on third-party inbound digital leads to putting resources toward fostering a direct-to-planner business source. This strategy brings relevant groups to the forefront for hotels to reach out to directly, closing gap dates, boosting repeat business, and optimizing profits.

But getting to that point takes deliberate effort, in part because handling inbound lead volume is already a time-consuming activity. The advent of eRFP platforms has given hotels a seemingly bottomless source of leads. While such tools “have given us a platform to reach meeting planners without leaving the offices,” Kiel said, “the question to be asking is: How well are those leads converting and at what cost?”

Sales leaders are beginning to question whether they have the right sales strategy for long-term success. Hotels won’t simply be able to flip a switch to a proactive sales strategy once the economy has already turned, so it’s vitally important to invest in these changes now. Is your team trained up? Do you have the right solutions in place to enable this strategy? What do you need to do to support proactive selling — and are you even measuring the right outcomes?

Room Blocks in Real Time

The Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI), in collaboration with Cvent, has released Room Blocks in Real Time, a white paper on the benefits—for meeting planners, hotels, and event attendees— of managing group bookings at hotels by strategically applying software solutions.

This white paper seeks to inform hoteliers about real-time data tools that can result in smarter, more efficient group booking management. 

» Access the report