After weathering the travel industry’s collective hit to its bottom line at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, hotel companies were anxious to ramp up bookings once demand started to trickle back in.
Contributed by Juliana Shallcross
Yet sales strategies that worked in 2019 no longer applied in this new post-COVID world. Making these efforts even harder was that most hotels had to furlough their sales ranks when the pandemic first hit. Even more concerning, the market looked nearly unrecognizable.
“The demand is different than it was before,” said Andrew Jordan, chief marketing officer for Aimbridge Hospitality, a third-party hotel management company with nearly 1,500 properties in its portfolio.
Gone were the large corporate events, the business travel contracts, and the dependable leisure travel segment. Instead, hotels saw demand shift to nearly all leisure travel led by last-minute bookings, small groups such as SMERFs [Social, military, educational religious, and fraternal groups], and extended-stay reservations.
“Now we’re chasing very different kinds of groups and we are hyper aware of where the demand is coming from, and how do we make sure we capture that?” Jordan said.
The new digital approach
To pinpoint these new demand sources and effectively target them, hotels have deepened their market insights and retooled their sales strategies.
Aimbridge relied heavily on their e-commerce department to reach the drive-up leisure segment in different ways than before, Jordan explains. Along with retargeting guests and groups who had cancelled during the pandemic as well as maintaining their paid social ads, Aimbridge took advantage of targeted digital billboards in their drive-through markets and even placed ads in the navigation app, Waze.
“We continued the traditional methods like AAA and paid search but we just laid a new element on it,” said Michael Wylie, senior vice president of e-commerce for Aimbridge. “For the short booking windows, it’s just a great opportunity. With Waze, you can actually see that the person drove up into the parking lot.”
Another successful tool in the company’s “rebound toolkit,” Wylie said, was to market towards real estate agents. With so many people selling their homes and in need of interim places to stay, hotels’ sales teams could sell the idea of an extended-stay hotel for the realtors’ clients.
“We’re just really thinking differently and partnering differently with the hotels,” Wylie added.
For Millennium Hotels & Resorts, finding new ways to reach new demand meant increasing digital marketing spend, investing in precise data tracking and gathering expansive market intelligence for more of a “sniper approach” to targeting potential businesses.
“We have implemented simple tracking systems to measure the demand across all channels: CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), Groups, Online, and we monitor it closely to gauge the increase in demand,” said Alex De Carvalho, Millennium’s vice president of sales and marketing for The Americas. “This way we increase our sales resources in line with increasing interest and demand. We also subscribe to some hospitality market intelligence to keep an eye on the entire market, and not just our own data.”
Paul Er, vice president of sales for Millennium’s Asia division, said his team continuously monitors the “shifting sands of consumer demand” through technology.
“We keep an insights heatmap on how the mix of consumer demand is likely to evolve and which pandemic-induced behavioral changes are likely to ‘stick,’” Er said. Additionally, Er’s division has provided virtual training and mentoring for its sales teams to address capability gaps as demand shifts online.
Kaaren Hamilton, vice president of global sales for RLH Corp. and a member of the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International, said the company started bringing back sales team members in the third quarter of 2020, a sign that business is indeed rebounding. Yet the focus on understanding the ever-shifting demand remains a priority. And for RLH, that’s done through close communication with clients to determine exactly how and when they are traveling.
“The Global Sales organization’s role in communicating account needs has really expanded to include much more detail around which travelers are back on the road or when they are anticipated to resume travel and what the behaviors of travel might look like,” Hamilton explained.
One move RLH Corp. made recently to remove friction for small groups is their new direct book solution. While this was in the works pre-pandemic, it was sped up to appease this newly important source of revenue and at the same time, “mitigate manual processes for our hotel operators, speed up the buying process and improve the customer experience,” Hamilton added.
At IHG Hotels & Resorts, staying on top of the shifting demand through the pandemic restrictions and shutdowns has been challenging, but Jonathan Kaplan, vice president of Americas sales and a member of HSMAI, said the company has upped its focus on being a data-driven organization to make better sense of what matters most to clients and guests.
“Our in-depth understanding of booking windows and business mix patterns from a hotel perspective allows us to optimize our segmentation mix and revenue performance,” Kaplan said. “It also provides us with the ability to track progress as it relates to capturing demand, and adjust strategies as needed.”Additionally, IHG has gathered local, in-market knowledge from property teams as well as increased collaboration between teams around the world so that when a market begins to recover, key learnings from that can be shared across the company.
Despite these hotel sales teams’ nimble abilities to adapt to the ups and downs of business, the pandemic is far from over, which means demand will likely keep shifting and so will the sales strategies.
“There is no established playbook on effective sales in a pandemic,” Er said. “Companies will need to experiment, see what works.”