NASHVILLE, Tennessee — First Hospitality’s Jenna Fishel has been a strong supporter of the hotel industry’s move toward commercial strategy, and she's experienced some "a-ha moments" behind that.
Fishel was promoted to chief commercial officer of the Chicago-based hotel developer and third-party management company earlier this year. She said one particular a-ha moment happened when she transitioned from overseeing just revenue management to overseeing the sales team as well.
“When I was in a revenue management role, it was very easy to look on the other side and point the finger, blame results on sales versus owning everything,” she said. “When I moved into the [senior vice president] role and oversaw sales, I quickly learned what a value all our sales team members are and what a big impact they have on the business, and it’s much harder than it looks.”
The company had a smaller marketing team at the time, and that’s a department she quickly grew passionate about because of the different level of expertise needed, she said. That required her to be a strong voice for the marketing department. Now there’s a senior vice president of marketing, a corporate director of marketing and area marketing managers.
“That’s really had a huge impact on the results at our properties,” she said.
More and more companies like First Hospitality Group have united their marketing, sales and revenue management departments under one commercial role, breaking down what typically had been siloed departments.
Fishel's team leaders now are the heads of marketing, sales and revenue management, and they have such trust in each other that they can call each other out, she said.
“If they’ve seen underperformance in a specific area, it doesn’t have to be a blame game,” she said. “They feel comfortable with each other that they know if something is being brought to their attention, it’s for a business purpose. There’s no ego in it.”
It’s not about who’s doing what wrong, she said. It’s about how to best support team members.
As the hotel industry overall is trying to navigate the challenging demand environment, Fishel said First Hospitality has tried to put an insurance policy in place for the rest of the year. It’s not about looking just at the current booking window; it's more about trying to get more bookings further out, she said. That starts with marketing.
“How are we building awareness, possibly promoting or packaging things different further out?” she said. “So, if the short-term behaviors change, we already have more bookings on the books than our competitors do, and that’s played out very well for us. Things have slightly decreased in recent months.”
The biggest year-over-year variance among demand segments has been from its retail contribution, she said.
“This has slid off very significantly, and we attribute this mainly to leisure travel changes,” she said, adding business travel has been better than expected as well. “Group started off strong throughout the year, and like other people have commented throughout the conference, we’re still seeing the lead volume. However, it is sitting there, and the business is not closing.”
That’s required some creative thinking to get some of those decision-makers to close the deal and get other segments to compensate for what’s lacking in the retail pickup.
For more from CoStar News Hotels' interview with First Hospitality’s Jenna Fishel, listen to the podcast above.