CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Hotel distribution experts believe their discipline remains one of the most underlooked and misunderstood — yet increasingly important — parts of the overall industry, and that will only become more true with the rise of artificial intelligence and automation.
Speaking during the "Fourth Leg of the Commercial Stool" session at the HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference, Sarah Fults, vice president of distribution for MGM Resorts International, said the talent development pipeline for distribution lags well behind related disciplines — most notably revenue management.
"With hiring, it's obviously very difficult to get people in distribution," she said. "One great way to do it is go to the hotel schools. We want to encourage the distribution discipline being talked about within the hotel schools."
She noted even in that environment, though, it's often overlooked.
"One thing we want to continue to encourage is the distribution discipline being talked about within the hospitality schools because it isn't always a focus. Revenue management overshadows us usually," she said.
She noted that often changes when students grow to understand the opportunities to use technology within distribution.
Sydney Goodwin, director of automated distribution at Omni Hotels and Resorts, said the need for talent will only grow along with artificial intelligence and automation because there needs to be a human capable of interfacing with those systems.
"The idea is it's not just data entry," she said. "To be able to interpret data, make sure it's getting to the right place that we're representing our hotels, our rates, our content in all the ways we want takes a skilled person. That's certainly what I want for my team, and that's where we're looking to go. But we're not there, yet."
Chris Murdock, director of distribution strategy at Accor and current president of industry distribution association HEDNA, agreed that while a lot of the focus of automation in the space is centered on cutting down positions, skilled experts are still a must.
"As an industry, we've been looking at automating for years," he said. "We've talked about this for decades. But you still need that manual input. There have been a lot of things around that do automate and help. It does reduce team size to some extent, but then you find you can focus on the other manual aspects."
He said one of his biggest focuses as HEDNA president is expanding education on the discipline and collaborating with more universities.
Murdock said the industry had a wake-up call with the COVID-19 pandemic when many distribution experts were forced to leave the industry and didn't come back when those positions opened back up.
"That's when it hit you right in the face," he said. "The years of experience that walked out the door, there's no pool to hire from and the amount of time that you end up spending teaching it and training that new team or one individual on even just rate loading for one system."
Goodwin said her company already leans on education resources from groups like HEDNA and is hopeful more in the industry will open themselves to distribution as a career path because those who do find it rewarding.
"It's really fun, especially if you like a little bit of technology, have some attention to detail and you want to know how things fit together," she said.
Goodwin noted that more organizations today have heads of distribution report up through revenue management, and while distribution has a bigger seat at the table than in years past, there's still room for improvement.
"I feel like the recognition of what we provide has increased massively in my career," she said. "Better recognition is happening, not to say that there's not more work to be done."