In this guide you will learn what hotels sales is and how to excel as a hotel sales professional. We will cover basic concepts of driving sales revenue to a hotel, as well as the principles of consistently reaching and exceeding your targets as a hotel salesperson.
Hotel sales consist of any activities aimed at generating revenue for the hotel. These include direct bookings, group sales, securing corporate contracts, and managing partnerships with online travel agencies (OTAs). The aim of these efforts is to maximize occupancy rates, ensure consistent revenue flow, and move towards the hotel’s overall business targets.
Each hotel is a unique business with its own focus, which dictates their target audience and the services they prioritize.
Here are the main categories of hotels and their typical sales strategies:
Leisure and tourist hotels cater primarily to tourists and vacationers, with a focus on amenities and experiences that enhance leisure and a relaxed atmosphere.
Business hotels are geared towards business travelers and prioritize convenience, efficiency, and connectivity. They focus on services that support professionals, including amenities such as high-speed internet and meeting rooms.
Conference and convention hotels are specifically designed to host large-scale meetings, conferences, and events. They offer extensive conference facilities, including multiple meeting rooms, large ballrooms, and the latest audiovisual equipment.
Other hotel types include boutique hotels, offering a unique and personalized experience in a stylish atmosphere, as well as extended-stay hotels.
Driving sales is part of a hotel's broader revenue management strategy. Aligning sales efforts with revenue management goals allows hotels to strategically target the right mix of guests.
Typically, the hotel will target both corporate clients and leisure travelers, but the focus of the hotel will dictate the main target group category. The target group will also determine the hotel’s sales and marketing strategies. In general, the marketing and sales strategies to drive sales for a hotel will be a mix of optimizing online presence, leveraging OTA’s, building corporate relationships, targeting group sales, upselling and cross-selling, as well as email marketing and retargeting campaigns.
Ensuring strong visibility on online platforms is a central marketing strategy to drive sales for each type of hotel. An optimized website, visibility in search engine results, and a strong presence on social media will all drive guests to the hotel and help build corporate relationships.
Online travel agencies, such as booking.com, trip.com and agodan, will effectively drive revenue especially from leisure and business travelers booking rooms and services online. OTA’s are a cost-effective way for hotels to boost occupancy, expand their reach, capture last-minute bookings, increase brand visibility, and leverage additional marketing tools provided by the third-party platform.
A central part of business-to-business sales for hotels is building and maintaining strong corporate relationships. Businesses travelers are often recurring customers for hotels and providing a smooth and reliable service will ensure they will keep coming back. Hotels can maintain strategic relationships with corporations by negotiating corporate rates, implementing loyalty programs to reward recurring guests, and providing an exceptional and personalized experience for key account guests.
Ensuring group bookings, such as corporate events, conferences, weddings, and other large gatherings, is a great chance for a hotel’s sales department to land large deals. Beyond just room revenue, group sales also generate additional income through catering, meeting space rentals, and other ancillary services.
Hotels can significantly increase their revenue per guest through room upgrades, premium amenities, and additional services like spa packages or dining experiences. This personalized approach not only enhances the guest experience but also encourages repeat stays and positive reviews, driving long-term profitability.
Hotels use email marketing to turn sales leads into new customers, and to retarget previous guests with personalized campaigns. Personalized email campaigns, tailored with special offers, loyalty rewards, or upcoming events, remind guests of their positive experiences, encouraging repeat bookings and strengthening brand loyalty, ultimately driving sustained profitability.
Hotels calculate sales using several revenue metrics. Common metrics used include revenue per average daily rate (ADR), occupancy rate, revenue per available room (RevPAR), and gross operating profit per available room (GOPPAR). These values are used to track how well the hotel is reaching its revenue targets and overall financial performance.
The Average Daily Rate represents the average revenue earned per occupied room over a specific period. It is calculated by dividing the total sum of room revenue with the number of rooms sold.
ADR = total room revenue / total number of rooms sold
ADR indicates how effectively the hotel is pricing its rooms. A low ADR might indicate that the hotel could potentially target a more profitable segment of customers. Optimizing ADR allows hotels to reach their full revenue potential. However, it's important to balance ADR with occupancy rates to ensure overall profitability.
The occupancy rate describes the percentage of rooms booked of the total number of rooms available. It is calculated by dividing booked rooms by the total number of rooms.
Occupancy rate = booked rooms / total number of rooms
A higher occupancy rate typically corresponds with increased revenue. However, the ADR reveals whether the booked rooms are priced effectively and to maximize revenue. Monitoring occupancy rates allows hotels to adjust their marketing, pricing, and distribution strategies to attract more guests, optimize room usage, and maintain a healthy balance between occupancy and pricing.
The revenue per available room metric combines the ADR and occupancy rates to reveal a hotel’s ability to fill its rooms with optimal pricing. It is calculated by multiplying the ADR by the occupancy rate, or dividing the total room revenue by the number of available rooms.
RevPAR = ADR x occupancy rate
The RevPAR offers a snapshot of how well the hotel uses its available inventory to generate revenue.
Gross Operating Profit Per Available Room (GOPPAR) is a comprehensive metric that measures a hotel’s overall financial performance by calculating the gross operating profit (GOP) relative to the number of available rooms.
Unlike RevPAR or ADR, GOPPAR covers all operational costs, making it a more holistic indicator of a hotel’s profitability. It is an important metric to evaluate how well a hotel manages its resources and expenses in relation to generated sales revenue.
Technology is one of the most effective tools for hotels to gain a competitive edge. Hotels that fail to leverage modern technology risk falling behind and operating inefficiently.
When considering which technologies and digital solutions to implement in hotel sales, the primary focus should be on enhancing revenue streams and addressing the real challenges that sales teams face in their daily operations.
Here are the most important tools hotel sales professionals use to maximize their revenue:
CRM systems are essential for managing client interactions, tracking bookings, and maintaining client history. By centralizing data, sales teams can easily access detailed client information and tailor their approaches, ensuring they meet individual needs. A CRM enables hotels to automate follow-ups, maintain long-term relationships, and identify new opportunities, ultimately driving more efficient sales processes.
Revenue management software allows hotels to optimize pricing by analyzing market demand, booking patterns, and competitor rates in real time. This helps sales teams dynamically adjust prices to ensure maximum occupancy and profitability. By utilizing data-driven insights, hotels can avoid overpricing during low-demand periods and maximize revenue during high-demand times.
Having upgraded presentations should be a priority for all hotel sales teams. It is the foremost way to effectively communicate your hotel’s value to clients during a sales call. Ensure you have all necessary assets readily available, including high-quality photos, virtual site tours, capacity charts, and floor plans. These tools help present a comprehensive view of your offerings, enabling clients to make confident decisions and helping you close deals faster.
Data analytics tools provide invaluable insights into guest preferences, booking trends, and market behavior. With accurate forecasting, hotels can anticipate busy periods, adjust staffing, and allocate resources more efficiently. This predictive approach enables better decision-making, allowing hotels to develop targeted sales strategies, optimize revenue, and identify potential market segments that were previously untapped.
Automated marketing platforms streamline the communication process by sending personalized messages, promotional offers, and booking reminders to targeted audiences. By automating these tasks, hotels can nurture leads more effectively, retarget previous guests, and create a seamless customer journey that boosts direct bookings. Automated campaigns can also be tailored for specific client segments, such as corporate travelers or event organizers.
This section covered the basic terminology and principles of sales as a part of a hotel's broader revenue management strategy. In the next section, we will dive into how an individual salesperson or sales manager can maximize results as part of a hotel sales team, as well consistently exceed their individual sales targets.
Top performing hotel salespeople do not only hit their targets week-by-week but become also an important asset for the hotel and the clients. They become a trusted advisor to their clients and an important representation of the hotel’s brand.
The three main pillars of a top-level hotel sales professional are:
Exceptional hotel salespeople adopt an ownership mindset, focusing not just on hitting individual targets, but on driving the overall performance of the hotel. High performers consistently exceed their targets because they see the bigger picture. Rather than moving inquiries across a pipeline, they manage each opportunity as part of the hotel's overall business strategy.
Top performing salespersons assess how each inquiry impacts the hotel’s revenue and profitability, ensuring the deals they close align with long-term goals. They consider how each deal fits the hotels targets for metrics such as ADR, RevPAR, or GOPPAR. This ownership mindset transforms them from sales representatives into strategic business managers, leading to more substantial and sustainable revenue growth.
Top-performing hotel salespeople engage in consultative selling, shifting from a transactional approach to one focused on building long-term relationships and solving clients’ needs. A deep understanding of the clients' goals and challenges allows them to provide tailored solutions that create value at every stage of the sales process.
Whether in prospecting, negotiating, or post-sales support, they position themselves as trusted advisors, helping clients achieve success. This value-driven approach builds stronger client loyalty, increases repeat business, and enhances the hotel's reputation as a partner rather than just a service provider.
Persistence and resilience are fundamental traits of successful hotel salespeople. In a competitive market, rejection is inevitable, and challenges are frequent. What sets top performers apart is their ability to stay motivated and bounce back from setbacks.
They don’t give up after a lost deal; instead, they learn from every experience, adjust their approach, and move forward with renewed determination. This resilience allows them to maintain momentum, stay engaged with clients, and continue closing deals, ensuring long-term success and growth for the hotel.
A professional salesperson not only possesses the personal qualities of a top performer but also actively seeks innovative ways to drive more revenue for the hotel. This proactive approach makes them an invaluable asset to the organization, providing a competitive advantage that sets the hotel apart in the marketplace.
In hotel sales, losing a meeting or an event to a competitor can often happen simply because you weren’t aware of the opportunity or overlooked key decision-makers.
Relationship mapping is essential to avoid this. By identifying all decision-makers and influencers involved in selecting hotel partners, you ensure that you're well-connected and on the running for deals.
Often, focusing on one contact within a company is not enough; you need to understand the broader buying group. Relationship mapping helps you expand your network within an account, allowing you to identify whose input matters most and which relationships need strengthening. This approach minimizes the risk of losing business due to buyer turnover or internal shifts.
Follow these steps to map out relationship in your most important accounts and target organizations:
Another way to ensure top sales results for a hotel is to maximize revenue from key accounts. This means tackling any signs of underperforming accounts as soon as possible.
Handling underperforming key accounts is crucial since a hotel's budget is often built on a base production from these accounts. Here are two clear signs of an underperform account:
If any of these signs are present, it is essential to take some time to identify the root cause. Start by having open conversations with your clients to understand any changes in their needs, preferences, or booking habits.
Once the reasons are clear, act to rectify the situation. This might include technical solutions like improving the booking process or addressing any operational challenges they face. It could also involve offering educational resources, such as informing clients about new amenities, services, or promotions they may not be aware of.
Strengthening the relationship itself is often key. This may involve more frequent communication, customized offers, or deeper engagement with the client’s decision-making team. By addressing underperformance from multiple angles, you can bring key accounts back on track and ensure their contribution to your hotel’s revenue remains strong.
Hotel sales is a unique process with its own quirks and nuances. Negotiating with clients over booking and partnerships often presents tricky situations even for seasoned hotel sales professionals.
Succeeding in hotel sales negotiations means avoiding unattractive terms for your hotel and instead ending up with a win-win situation with the client.
Follow these three steps to prepare for a negotiation and reach your targets every time:
As the hospitality landscape evolves, staying ahead of emerging trends is crucial for driving hotel sales and remaining competitive. Embracing these key trends allows hotel sales teams to enhance their strategies, meet changing guest expectations, and unlock new revenue opportunities.
AI-driven tools are reshaping the way hotel sales teams operate. Chatbots streamline communication by offering real-time assistance, while machine learning helps optimize pricing through dynamic, data-driven strategies. These technologies allow hotels to anticipate demand fluctuations, personalize marketing efforts, and maximize revenue. As AI evolves, sales teams can focus more on relationship building and closing high-value deals.
The rising demand for sustainability is becoming a key factor in hotel sales strategies. Guests, especially Millennials and Gen Z, increasingly prioritize eco-friendly and ethical travel options. Sales teams that position their hotels as leaders in sustainability—by promoting green initiatives, eco-certifications, and responsible practices—can attract a growing market segment, enhancing both reputation and revenue.
With the rise of digital nomads and remote business travelers, the demand for work-friendly environments in hotels is surging. Offering flexible workspaces and coworking areas gives hotels a competitive advantage. Sales teams can attract this new breed of traveler by promoting meeting rooms, high-speed internet, and amenities that cater to remote work, opening up new revenue streams from longer stays and repeat bookings.
Remote selling is becoming a vital strategy for hotels, especially in the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions (MICE) sector. With clients increasingly spread across the globe, offering virtual tours, video conferencing, and online presentations has become essential. Sales teams can now engage potential clients without the need for in-person site visits, showcasing event spaces and services through immersive virtual experiences. This allows for faster decision-making, expands the hotel's reach to international clients, and offers flexibility, ultimately boosting sales while minimizing operational costs.
