Commercial strategy in hospitality is no longer the new thing to aspire to but the basis on which it must move forward, Aimbridge Hospitality's Allison Handy said.
In a podcast interview with CoStar News Hotels, Handy said that it was over 10 years ago when she began talking about wanting to move toward commercial strategy in the hotel industry. Everyone should be past that as an idea now.
“Commercial strategy is now the foundation,” she said.
For years, it was about breaking down the silos of revenue management, sales and marketing to make sure everyone was running with one set of aligned goals, she said. That’s no longer the narrative because travelers are shopping differently now. They’re looking in many different places, and there are so many different distribution avenues for them to reach hotels.
As part of its own continued march forward, Aimbridge launched its Global Sales Office in June, allowing it to unify its teams around the globe into one sales team, Handy said. Along with giving team members new titles, the corporate office mailed them world clocks to get them thinking about selling on a global level.
Within the first week, Aimbridge’s Europe team sent over an account to the U.S., and they collectively closed it in eight different markets across the U.S.
“It’s just continued to snowball from there,” she said.
Aimbridge is also moving into the next phase of its artificial intelligence forecasting tool for top-line revenue, she said. The commercial strategy department began using the tool in July 2025, using AI projections for occupancy. Now the department is forecasting all the way through transient, and its accuracy rates are high. The next phase is change management.
“We think so much about the technology piece of all the AI rollouts, but you also have the change management piece that you have to work with, so it’s getting our teams to trust it and adopt it,” she said.
The department will start new training next year to prepare its sales leaders for what the next phase of hotel sales looks like with AI, she said.
As travelers continue to change how they plan and book trips given the new technologies made available to them, hotel companies have to do what they can to keep up.
“I think that the next evolution of commercial strategy, if you will, is really customer journey strategy, and there is no breakdown of what part of that customer journey is marketing and what part of that customer journey is revenue management,” Handy said.
It’s about figuring out how travelers are finding the hotels, she said. It’s about how travelers are comparing Aimbridge’s hotels to others, including the rates. How are they making their decision whether to book with Aimbridge?
“That customer journey now runs all the way through to execution and the guest experience and then advocacy,” she said. “And advocacy now plays such a big role in the entire commercial ecosystem, if you will, of how the customer finds us.”
It’s the entire commercial ecosystem of how customers find their hotels, she said. The customer journey, which she is now calling the commercial journey, is overtaking the idea of commercial strategy.
“At the end of the day, if you're not in commercial strategy right now, you're behind the eight ball,” she said. “So, I hope that there's not anyone still trying to work on their commercial strategy because that truly is the foundation now of our business.
“I'm really shifting gears in how we apply commercial strategy to the customer journey because that's the future.”
For more from Aimbridge Hospitality’s Allison Handy, listen to the podcast embedded above.