Many hotels have lost their commercial talents during the pandemic. There was no business to attract, so marketing, sales, and revenue management had to take time out. Team members were laid off permanently, furloughed until further notice. In many independent hotels, the GM or the owner had to keep the commercial activities afloat and, most of the time, to a minimum. Now it is time to build a high-performance commercial team.
Before the pandemic, many independent hotels had marketing, sales, and revenue roles report directly to the GM. These roles worked in their silos and often had very different opinions about pricing, target groups, and timing for campaigns based on their data and acquired knowledge from various sources. At hospitality industry conferences, everyone agreed that working in silos was not optimal, but it was tough to change the organization and the behavior. Now is the time to stop working in silos and lay a foundation for a commercial team. In many hotels, for the time being, this is a team of none or one, but when the business is coming back, the commercial team idea is already in place, and the task is to fill the predefined roles when the timing is right.
It will be more critical than ever before for every hotel to monitor the recovery to make adjustments to the overall plan before it is too late. Easily accessible information that will give the commercial team the right insights is essential in a recovery phase than when the demand is high, and the job is to manage the never-ending flow of reservations.
Hotels that seize this opportunity to re-think which resources they need to acquire their guests and customers will be winners during the recovery and in the future.
We have created five building blocks needed to create a high-performance commercial team to faster recover during the next couple of years.
The five building blocks are
- Build the right organizational structure
- Hire A-level talents
- Automate to minimize waste of time
- Execute the recovery strategy
- Communicate progress
