NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Leisure demand has been strong across the hotel industry, and Monika Morrobel, senior corporate director of commercial strategy for the Kessler Collection, said her company’s boutique portfolio hasn’t been an exception.
“[Leisure demand has been] very good. We keep trying to find our rate ceiling, and then it just keeps going higher. We keep pushing it as far as we can go,” Morrobel said during a video interview with Hotel News Now at the Hotel Data Conference.
Group and business-transient demand has been slower to come back, but Morrobel said the outlook for the rest of 2022 is positive and those guest segments should be stronger in the fourth quarter than they have been at any point this year.
Even as leisure demand tapers off from the summer months, the company is not planning for a recession, she said.
“That high leisure demand that we'd coasted through all pandemic — it was going to have to come down at some point,” she said. “Now that it finally is, it's not really a surprise, it just means, ‘OK, now we're getting back to what a normal stabilization looks like,’ rather than an actual recession.”
Morrobel said the hospitality industry is starting to understand how revenue management has to be more collaborative with other teams such as sales and marketing.
“We need to move away from the silos of revenue management is here and sales is here and marketing is there. We have to bring it all together,” she said. “Revenue management and rate yielding itself, it cannot work in its little hole over here. It has to be in conjunction with operations.”
For more from Kessler Collection's Monika Morrobel, watch the video above.