NASHVILLE, Tennessee — If there's one thing hoteliers can do to drive growth for their commercial strategy, it's prioritize and incentivize teamwork across revenue management, sales and marketing.
This is not only the best plan of action, but also a dominant trend in the hospitality industry right now, according to commercial strategists on a panel at the 2025 Hotel Data Conference.
"In the field, we find that directors of sales and directors of revenue many times run in parallel, and each one has their own objective, and we want to break those silos, and we want to make sure that there's more collaboration and cohesiveness," said Lior Sekler, chief commercial officer at HRI Lodging.
Collaborating effectively
The benefit to this streamlined approach is vast, said Nick Knight, director of hospitality solutions at Duetto, and can positively affect a hotel company in more ways than one.
"If you're starting with that same top goal that you all share, you can have your individual tasks to get there, right? But if you're all working towards that same goal, then you're more effective, you're quicker to make decisions, you're quicker to act and pivot. You're also reducing a lot of workplace tension," he said.
Sekler said a key component of merging team efforts and getting everyone on the same page is sharing data and information.
"You don't know what you don't know," he said. "Everybody was focused on their own discipline, and there was no sharing of information, ideas, innovation. And now that all of the disciplines and all of the engines are working together, there's more of that challenge. ... We spend a lot of time on education, both at our level, the corporate level, as well as the field."
HRI Lodging has started discovery sections so that each team can share what all they work on — from navigating the social media landscape to sifting through benchmark data from CoStar, Sekler said.
Jenna Fishel, chief commercial officer at First Hospitality, said that the company's leadership took its internal collaboration a step further by putting sales booking performance goals into the revenue management bonus program, something that wasn't a popular decision initially but forced First Hospitality's teams to work together and learn more about what each other does.
"They all have similar components, whether they be in the sales, marketing or revenue management vertical, and the one common theme they have in all of them is [revenue per available room] index. So we're talking about results and celebrating them similarly," she said.
Garine Ferejian-Mayo, chief commercial officer at Sonesta International, emphasized the importance of sharing information between teams and how a company's data organization is instrumental to success.
"Data is king," she said. "Being able to share the data when we're looking at pace, performance and how are we moving things in a certain way, educating the team members really helps, because then they're all driven to get to that same goal, and that cohesiveness is really critical to drive performance."
Knight agreed, adding that "once you can stop arguing about the data and the contribution from each side, then you can start having healthy arguments about strategy."
Finding the right vendor balance
After hotel teams have unified their data, they can optimize the tech stack and vendors, Knight said.
"You want to work with that right tech partner that allows you to fit your goals and your asset into that piece of tech instead of the other way around," he said. "There's nothing more frustrating than rolling out a new piece of tech and realizing you just created more hurdles instead of removing that for your team."
Adding in new vendors and technologies is always something commercial strategy teams have to think about, and Sekler said there's a balance between internal and external tech tools.
"Our industry is doing a really good job in developing advanced, innovative tools that really help us make better decisions," Sekler said.
He added that new technologies should "cater to our needs, either simplify the information, streamline it, automate it in different ways to allow our commercial leaders to analyze and process the information to make their daily operation more effective."
From First Hospitality's perspective, simplicity is key. Fishel said she's focused on minimizing the number of vendors the company's team uses.
"The number of systems that we're asking every revenue manager or every salesperson to log into — we're really trying to condense that," she said. "We may be interested in purchasing data from some of these vendors and importing it into our own tools. But if it's just another system, you know what that's like. It's not going to be used to its full potential."
Ferejian-Mayo agreed with hoteliers simplifying their tech stack and vendors. She recommended that teams take a moment to evaluate what platforms and services are most valuable, then scale back on things that don't make the cut.
Marketing is an area where technology and vendors could be beneficial, but your own internal team is your biggest asset. It's the marketing teams that have critical brand relationships, Fishel said, so bringing them into big-picture conversations is important — as is providing them resources.
"When I look at the structures of some of our competitors, one thing I think they've under allocated is marketing resources," she said, adding that "we've seen a lot of success by continuing to invest not just in the actual marketing spend but the team itself."
Remembering the big-picture goal
At the end of the day, properly running hotel commercial strategy teams should translate to enhancing the customer experience, which is more important than ever now with top-line hospitality metrics suffering across the board.
"Everybody saw on stage what our RevPAR growth will be this year, what it's going to do the next two years, which means every traveler has a choice, and we all know we have to work five times harder to get that same customer to come back to our hotel," Ferejian-Mayo said. "So, customer experience is absolutely critical."
Fishel, who said she previously worked as a general manager on property, brought it back to the importance of aligned teams — not just at the corporate level, but down to the employees at the individual hotels.
"Everyone has an impact on revenue and the properties," Fishel said.