TORONTO — The disciplines of revenue management, marketing, sales and digital have always been closely connected in the operations of hotels, but since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been greater focus on the communication and collaboration between the four than ever.
In a roundtable discussion at HSMAI’s 2023 Revenue Optimization Conference Americas, Erica Lipscomb, senior vice president of revenue management at Crescent Hotels & Resorts, said all decisions and strategies at each individual hotel should have those four disciplines involved.
“You need to have each one of your partners involved and engaged, because you need to have the different perspectives on how to make sure you’re impacting a customer along every touchpoint of their journey,” she said.
At Crescent, strategy meetings have become more conversational, with leaders from various departments rotating who runs the meeting, Lipscomb said.
Cassie Bond, vice president of commercial strategy at Lodging Dynamics Hospitality Group, said these meetings should be reserved for high-level strategy and discussion among all the disciplines rather than a day-to-day practice.
Commercial strategy is a holistic approach, and while some properties may lean more heavily toward one discipline than another, the process will be a joint effort between the commercial team, said Christina Pedersen, vice president of commercial strategy at Aimbridge Hospitality.
“As we tackle strategy at each asset, we’re going to look at it through this lens of all the disciplines,” she said. “It's just about being able to customize the approach but have the participation and collaboration with the team and with the experts in each different area, so that we can pull the trigger quickly.”
Other Disciplines to Consider in the Commercial Process
Although commercial strategy teams are mostly comprised of the four traditional disciplines, the collaboration should be extended to other areas to maximize hotel performance.
Libbi Carlson, vice president of revenue strategy at Remington Hospitality, said all operation partners, such as food and beverage, need to have the same vision and work with the same metrics.
“Everybody, regardless of the title at the hotel, is working towards the same goal, so I think everybody needs to be part of that collaborative process,” she said. “You can’t just say we have a commercial process; it has to be a total hotel process.”
Rather than the commercial process starting and ending with revenue management, sales, marketing and digital, the vision and strategy should be shared across each team at a property, Pedersen said.
“It’s more of a commercial culture instead of a commercial team,” she said. “It’s embracing it fully with a hotel, with finance, with operations, with everybody really thinking in that way.”
When a new product is rolled out from the commercial strategy team, it changes how every discipline at a hotel works. A certain level of understanding is required across all disciplines for that product to reach its fullest potential, Pedersen said.
Getting approval on new ideas formed within a commercial team is much easier when there’s already a channel of communication open with all operations teams, Bond said.
“Whether you’re rolling out initiatives, processes, anything to drive performance, you have to have the full support of operations of every different discipline,” she said. “That’s why it has to start together.”
Acquiring, Nurturing Talent
Like most in the hotel industry, labor has been a concern for commercial strategy teams since the COVID-19 pandemic. What makes the labor concerns unique in the commercial strategy field is that the skills sought after for these jobs concurrently hit an inflection point.
Communication skills, critical thinking skills and flexibility are what commercial strategy teams are looking for today, not necessarily knowledge of a system, Carlson said.
“We need people who understand and get strategy, and if they have to learn a particular system, that’s OK,” she said. “[If] they have the base skills of what we’re looking for … they can learn how to make it happen.”
In order to fill labor gaps, more emphasis must be placed on development, both internally and by hiring younger employees, said Dana Cariss, vice president of revenue strategy and distribution at CoralTree Hospitality.
“As an industry we need to do a better job of attracting young talent and developing it and fostering its general growth,” he said. “For us, we’re almost exclusively focused inside and looking for people who have a skill set … that we think could be developed into something great.”
Lipscomb said front-office and sales positions are the main starting points for internal growth due to their built-in knowledge of customer touchpoints.
“We can teach systems. It’s harder to teach someone who is passionate about numbers [about] customer touchpoints and how to influence and engage and communicate to the right audiences the right way,” she said.
Chris Cheney, vice president of hotel performance and analytics at Stonebridge Companies, said the hotel industry has an opportunity to start attracting younger employees through internships with high school students rather than college students.
“High school graduates that are questioning [their future], they want to take a year before deciding on college, get them into either a hotel or an internship or revenue coordinator or analyst role,” he said. “You can go to college and learn a lot about economics, but you can learn a lot about economics working in revenue management in the hotel industry.”
Internships are an opportunity to spark an interest in the industry in a low-stress role that can eventually lead to a career, Lipscomb said. Plus, they can alleviate some labor hardships.