The Three Imperatives: A New Playbook for Hotel Commercial Leaders
29 July 2025
For hotel commercial leaders, the current market feels like sailing on deceptively calm seas. The waves of post-pandemic "revenge travel" have subsided into a steady tide of demand. Still, powerful, unseen currents of economic uncertainty and fierce competition are churning just below the surface. The strategies that drove success over the past few years—riding a wave of high demand and aggressive rate growth—are no longer sufficient.
We are now in a new era that demands greater sophistication, agility, and a fundamental shift in how we approach revenue, data, and talent. Over the next 12 months, success hinges on mastering three critical imperatives rather than merely optimizing RevPAR or managing departmental budgets in isolation.
This article cuts through the noise to focus on the strategic challenges that every commercial leader must confront head-on:
- The Profitability Puzzle: Shifting from a volume-based to a value-based model focused on total guest profitability and maximizing flow-through.
- The Data Deluge: Transforming mountains of data from a daily burden into a decisive, actionable advantage.
- The Talent Imperative: Evolving from managing siloed departments to leading a single, unified team aligned around the end-to-end guest journey.
These are not just trends; they are the new foundation of commercial success. Getting them right will be the difference between merely surviving and truly thriving in the year ahead.
Challenge 1: The Profitability Puzzle: Winning the Right Guest in a Value-Conscious Market
While the demand for travel continues to grow, the pace has normalized. This new environment presents a more complex challenge. The fight is no longer for any guest; it's for the right guest in a marketplace saturated with choice.
Modern travelers, whether on corporate trips or family holidays, stay more informed and deliberate than ever. Armed with comparison sites and endless reviews, they push successful commercial teams to pivot from simply maximizing top-line revenue to maximizing flow-through. The crucial question is no longer just "What was our RevPAR?" but "Of every incremental euro we earned, how much did we convert to actual profit?" Maximizing flow-through is the ultimate measure of how efficiently a hotel converts new revenue into bottom-line results, and it demands a more innovative and targeted commercial approach.
The Problem: A Sea of Choice and the "Unbundling" Trap
Today's guests face a paradoxical choice, as the abundance of hotel options encourages extensive comparison shopping. As a result, booking windows have become shorter, and price has taken on greater importance.
Compounding this is a trend across the industry: the "unbundling" of the hotel stay. More hotels are stripping out services like breakfast, flexible cancellation, or even housekeeping to display the lowest possible headline rate. While this might attract initial clicks, it can create guest friction and a feeling of being "nickel-and-dimed." A low initial price that balloons with essential add-ons doesn't build trust or loyalty. The "unbundling" trend creates a clear strategic opening for those willing to play a different game.
The Focus: A Three-Pronged Strategy for Profitable Growth
To navigate this, hotels must move away from a one-size-fits-all approach and focus on three core pillars:
- Targeting "Total Guest Value": Commercial strategy must shift from managing room revenue to cultivating total guest value. Begin with identifying guests who are the best fit for a hotel's specific offerings—those who appreciate and purchase more than just a bed for the night. Data analysis should focus on identifying segments likely to spend on dining, book spa treatments, or use meeting spaces. Sales and marketing efforts can then target these high-value profiles, ensuring the hotel's message appeals to guests who view the property as an experience, not just a commodity.
- Communicating Value Through Smart Bundling: While competitors unbundle, smart hotels will bundle. Instead of stripping services out, they can create attractive, easy-to-understand packages that offer both value and convenience. This is the direct response to the confusing, multi-step booking process guests dislike. For example:
- The Seamless Business Trip: A package including the room, high-speed premium Wi-Fi, grab-and-go breakfast, and a late check-out.
- The City Weekend Escape: A bundle with the room, a dinner credit at the restaurant, two welcome drinks at the bar, and complimentary parking. This strategy enables hotels to maintain their average rate while conveying a superior value proposition by offering a comprehensive, stress-free solution, rather than a list of separate charges.
- A Laser Focus on Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): As competition intensifies, the cost to attract a guest inevitably rises. It's no longer enough to know where bookings are coming from; commercial leaders must understand what each booking truly costs. A deep analysis of CAC must be a top priority. Hotels must look beyond just OTA commissions and evaluate the all-inclusive cost of a booking from any channel—be it the marketing spend on Google Ads, the resources for social media campaigns, or the cost of sales for corporate accounts. By understanding the net profit from each channel, hotels can make smarter investment decisions, shifting budget towards channels that deliver not just volume, but loyal and profitable guests.
Challenge 2: From Data Deluge to Actionable Insight: Taming the Modern Tech Stack
Hotels today are sitting on a mountain of data. Information floods in from the Property Management System (PMS), the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, the Revenue Management System (RMS), channel managers, and various digital marketing and social media platforms. Most hotels are data-rich, but many remain insight-poor.
The critical challenge for commercial leaders is no longer data acquisition; it's data activation. The goal is to connect these disparate data points into a single, coherent picture that enables faster, more innovative, and more profitable decisions.
The Problem: Analysis Paralysis and a Fragmented Tech Ecosystem
Across the industry, commercial teams spend an inordinate amount of time manually pulling reports from various systems and attempting to integrate them in spreadsheets. Too much historical data can lead to "analysis paralysis," where teams become stuck looking in the rearview mirror instead of proactively steering the business forward.
Furthermore, the hotel tech landscape is notoriously fragmented. The promise of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning is immense, but integrating these powerful new tools into existing—and often legacy—systems is a significant barrier. Lack of integration results in expensive, shiny new tools that usually go underutilized, failing to deliver on their potential ROI because they fail to integrate with the rest of the tech stack.
The Focus: A Three-Part Framework for Data Activation
To turn this data deluge into a competitive advantage, commercial leaders must champion a clear, three-part framework:
- Mandating a Single Source of Truth: The top tech priority for any commercial team must be the creation of a unified data environment. The most effective way to achieve this is by implementing Business Intelligence (BI) tools that sit on top of all other core systems. The goal is to create automated dashboards that provide an instant, holistic view of a hotel's performance, forecast, and pace—segmented by market and channel—without requiring hours of manual data pulling. This frees up the team's time for what truly matters: strategy and execution.
- Investing in Data Literacy: A tool is useless without a skilled operator. Investment in upskilling teams in data literacy is non-negotiable. The modern commercial team requires revenue managers who can interrogate the data and question the outputs of an algorithm, marketers who can interpret digital campaign results beyond surface-level clicks, and salespeople who use CRM data to have more meaningful, intelligence-led conversations with clients. The focus must shift from simply running reports to understanding the story the data is telling.
- Adopting Practical, Purposeful AI: The most innovative approach to AI is not a complete, revolutionary overhaul, but a series of practical, targeted applications that solve specific problems. Instead of chasing abstract concepts, leaders should encourage pilots that deliver clear value. For example:
- Using generative AI to create highly personalized email marketing copy for different customer segments at scale.
- Leveraging machine learning to refine demand forecasts for specific city-wide events or holiday periods, leading to more accurate pricing and inventory decisions. This purposeful adoption demystifies AI and builds momentum by demonstrating its tangible impact on revenue and efficiency.
Challenge 3: The Talent Imperative: Aligning Teams Around the Guest
The roles within a modern hotel's commercial team have undergone fundamental changes. The traditional, relationship-focused salesperson remains valuable, but is no longer sufficient. A data analyst has replaced the "gut-feel" revenue manager. The marketer who once bought print ads is now a digital performance expert.
Finding, retaining, and—most importantly—unifying talent that possesses this blend of analytical, strategic, and interpersonal skills is arguably the most complex challenge commercial leaders face.
The Problem: A Persistent Talent Gap and Misaligned Teams
There is a growing chasm between the capabilities modern hotels need and the skills available in the talent pool. The most dynamic individuals are in high demand, often lured away by the salaries and prestige of the tech industry.
Internally, the persistent enemy is the functional silo. When Revenue, Marketing, and Sales operate with different goals and KPIs, they inevitably work at cross-purposes. Keeping the silos creates a disjointed commercial strategy that not only leaves money on the table but, more critically, confuses and frustrates the guest. The commercial leader's role should not be to act as a permanent mediator between these departments.
The Focus: A Purpose-Driven Approach to Talent and Teamwork
Superficial fixes, such as shared KPIs, are often just a patch on a deeper issue. Proper alignment comes from a shared purpose. The focus must shift from internal metrics to the one thing that unites every department: the guest journey.
- Aligning the Team Around the Guest Journey: Silos break down organically when the entire commercial team focuses on the guest's path, not their own department's function. They should map the hotel's activities across the five core stages of the guest journey:
- Attract: Creating awareness and desire through strategic marketing, branding, and public relations.
- Capture: Converting interest into profitable bookings through skilled sales, intelligent revenue management, and seamless e-commerce.
- Prepare: The critical pre-arrival phase of communication and operational readiness that sets expectations and paves the way for a smooth stay.
- Deliver: The on-site experience, where every single team member—from the general manager to housekeeping—contributes to guest satisfaction.
- Review: Actively encouraging guest feedback and managing online reputation to create a virtuous cycle that fuels the next "Attract" phase.
- Building Skills Across the Entire Guest Journey: To break down silos, focus skill development on the shared journey. Competing with tech salaries is tough, but hotels can offer a more integrated and appealing career path by developing talent holistically. Instead of training people to excel in a single function, the goal is to create commercial athletes who understand the entire process. For example:
- A Marketer (Attract) must be trained in revenue principles to understand how their campaigns impact profitability, not just occupancy (Capture).
- A Revenue Manager (Capture) must understand the hotel's operational capacity and service standards to price packages and rooms realistically (Deliver).
- A Sales Manager (Capture) needs deep insight into digital analytics to understand a client's online behaviour before they even make contact (Attract). This approach cultivates empathetic, well-rounded leaders who make decisions based on the overall success of the guest journey, rather than just the success of their department.
- Arming Essential Workers with Insight: This principle is most critical in the "Deliver" and "Review" stages of the journey. A brilliant strategy is worthless if it's not executed by those who interact with guests every minute of the day. Empowerment is more than just training; it's about providing all essential workers—from the front desk and restaurant servers to housekeeping and spa therapists—with the correct information. When a team member has insights from the CRM at their fingertips, they can personalize service, anticipate needs, and resolve issues proactively. Satisfied guests leave positive reviews, which directly fuels the top of the marketing funnel, creating a virtuous cycle where exceptional service becomes the hotel's most powerful commercial tool.
The Path Forward
The next twelve months will undoubtedly be demanding. The market requires a level of sophistication and agility that was once optional but is now essential for survival and growth.
Commercial leaders must navigate a dual reality. On the one hand, the future looks bright. There are potent drivers of growth on the horizon; for instance, the massive domestic investments announced by companies in the US, spurred by government pressure, are set to fuel a significant new wave of business travel. On the other hand, despite apparent progress in global trade negotiations and conflict resolution, the geopolitical landscape remains fragile. Leaders must prepare for crises that can change travel patterns overnight.
In this environment of both opportunity and uncertainty, the leaders who succeed will be those who build resilient, adaptable strategies founded on the principles we've discussed. They will be the ones who master profitability by focusing on guest value, not just volume; they will turn data into a decisive advantage through smart integration and practical AI; and most critically, they will build unified, purpose-driven teams aligned around the entire guest journey.
For those who rise to these challenges, the opportunities to win market share are immense.