NASHVILLE, Tennessee — During challenging times, small wins make a big difference to your bottom line. At least, that's one thing Stonebridge Companies' Chris Cheney is seeing amid top-line contraction in the hotel industry.
In an interview at the Hotel Data Conference, Stonebridge's executive vice president of commercial services said that amid macroeconomic uncertainty, the company's "focus then shifts to making sure we're managing to profitability for the owner, while still delivering guest service, while still taking care of the asset. And it becomes really a tightrope walk."
"It's really about having the bandwidth and the size of the team at the corporate office to be able to get in the weeds on every hotel and identify small opportunities, because it's going to be a lot of little opportunities that add up to success this year, given the contraction we've seen in the top line," Cheney said.
Little wins can also include finding opportunities in expense reduction — beyond just cutting labor costs — while maintaining a good level of service.
"This year, we've gone back to all of our vendors and partners and had new discussions on what a contract looks like, where we can find additional savings for our owners and for our hotels everywhere in [the profit-and-loss statement], and it's also bringing scale of goods and services where we have market concentration," he said.
Cheney said better collaboration internally can make a big difference to streamlining business operations, too.
"In revenue management, one of the trends is this move to a broader integration with the commercial teams — so, looking beyond revenue management to how does revenue strategy fold in with the sales strategy and the digital strategy and marketing," he said. "We've taken that approach of having all those disciplines roll up to one commercial leader, and it allows our teams to look at a holistic strategy."
It also allows for better sharing of data and information, which can help sales jump on opportunities in real time.
"We want information that tells us when guests are likely to book before they book, so that we can reach out to them, we can speak to them, we can optimize strategies around them before they actually take the action," Cheney said.