Speakers at the recent 2024 HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, continued to push for more collaboration between sales, marketing and revenue-management teams, and said metrics between the three disciplines should be aligned to maximize their goals.

General sessions covered topics such as California's new hidden junk fees laws and an outlook on how the U.S. economy will affect hotel demand.

Commercial strategy teams — comprised of revenue management, sales and marketing — have been striving toward more collaboration between disciplines for several years now. The focus is now geared more toward the best practices within that collaboration, as most teams have already begun working with each other.

Lori Kiel, chief commercial officer at The Boca Raton, said during the "Orchestrating Excellence: Crafting a Unified Commercial Strategy in Hotels" session that the three fields have a mutual respect for each other. In order to be a leader in the broader commercial strategy umbrella, she said there needs to be an understanding of how the other disciplines operate.

"I've got to know enough about sales so that when I use my own expertise, I know how to optimize using my salesperson's expertise, as well," she said. "What is the segment that they're after? What are the feeder markets? Do we all know the need dates? ... In marketing, it's the same thing. What are you marketing? Are you marketing what I need, or are you out there just marketing what you want to market? It matters."

One of the biggest challenges as a commercial leader is managing the different personalities between disciplines, said Gisell Moronta, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Atrium Hospitality.

"The best salespeople have both creativity and analytical skills, however, more often than not, they have more of one than the other," she said. "The key here as great commercial leaders is to know that both can be extremely successful."

Moronta said aligning goals and training between the three disciplines helps lead to broad success, and success should be measured by the overall team's results rather than each individual team.

"If we continue to be measured by our individual impact, we will never build a commercially focused organization," she said.

For example, digital marketers said during the "Revolutionizing Profitability: Rethinking the ROAS Model" that return on ad spend is an outdated, flawed metric that hinders their ability to effectively collaborate with the other teams.

"When you're sitting in an owner's meeting and you've got other top-line disciplines at the table who are all speaking the same language, and then on the digital side you're talking about your return on ad spend and how much awareness you've generated, a lot of times there's absolutely a disconnect there," said Dan Fernandez, vice president of digital marketing and strategy at Concord Hospitality. "We have not had as collaborative discussions at that table when those KPIs and those goals are in play."

Commercial teams work at their best when there's a feedback loop between the three, meaning the disciplines are sharing information that could help the others, Cogwheel Marketing & Analytics CEO Stephanie Smith said.

During the "What Does Successful Commercial Collaboration Really Look Like" session, Chris Hardy, vice president of commercial strategy at Parks Hospitality Group, said one of the challenges of aligning metrics between the teams is that communication piece.

"I think the silos have been broken down, but the systems for each discipline have not," he said. "We're still working in an environment where revenue has systems, marketing has their systems and sales has more systems. There's still fragmentation there."

Greg Duff, principal and chair of hospitality, travel and tourism practice at Foster Garvey PC, broke down the California hidden fees laws and how they would affect hoteliers both in and outside of the state during the "Headlines and Headwinds: Navigating the Legal and Regulatory Currents" session.

California Senate Bill No. 478 includes the Unfair Competition Law and the Consumers Legal Remedies Act, the latter being "far more important" for hoteliers, Duff said. He explained that the law applies to Californian consumers even if they're looking at a property online outside the state because it is directed toward consumer transactions rather than hotel transactions.

"So what does that mean? If you know Californians that are looking at your property online, if you have a history of Californians staying at your property, if you have reason to believe that guests from California frequent your property, the rule likely applies to you as well," he said.

Speaking during the "Economic Outlook: The Economic and Geopolitical Risks and Opportunities Ahead" general session, Aran Ryan, director of industry studies at Tourism Economics, said each travel segment has tailwinds and fears about the economy are overblown despite hotel demand not being where hoteliers would like to see it currently.

Consumer spending numbers are likely to shift to services like travel in the near future, and the job market has remained strong in the U.S., he said.

"The economy has proven to be stronger than we anticipated, both in terms of businesses continuing to hire and consumers remaining confident," he said. "The brunt of those higher interest rates has been borne pretty well, we're starting to see inflation come down — it really is a pretty good soft landing at this point."

Revenue managers said the hotel industry's recovery from the pandemic has been inconsistent across travel segments as they recover at different paces.

Speaking during a roundtable discussion hosted by HNN, Erica Lipscomb, senior vice president of revenue strategy at Crescent Hotels & Resorts, said her company is targeting the segments that aren't back to 2019 levels yet.

"We are looking for what are those segmentations that have not recovered, and then how are we leaning in heavy on those to make sure we're spending our marketing funds in the right place," she said.

Attempting to maintain rates while bringing in more business and group travel in place of moderating leisure demand has proven difficult.

"It's all about the mix of business that's hindering rate from growing as much as people hoped it would — or even maintaining rate because as leisure's changed and group or [business travel] has replaced it, it's just not coming in at the same rates," said Linda Gulrajani, vice president of revenue strategy and distribution at Marcus Hotels & Resorts.

Panelists also spoke about hiring, retaining and recruiting talent to the revenue management discipline.

Geoffrey Field, vice president of revenue management at Shaner Hotel Group, said while it's not the easiest route to take, recruiting undergraduate students who are studying an applicable subject is the best option.

"It's the hardest way to go, but it's ultimately the most effective way to go to have real good talent in your teams," he said. "Obviously, all of us would love to post a position and have 20 candidates who know everything about everything and can hit the road running when you hire. It's not out there. Going the hard route has worked for our company."

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