SALES & MARKETING
How sales teams mine for
NEW DEMAND
SEVERAL DIFFERENT METHODS , INCLUDING “ A SNIPER APPROACH ,” ARE HELPING DELIVER ON EVOLVING SOURCES OF DEMAND .
Contributed By JULIANA SHALLCROSS
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 .
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 ,” says 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 says .
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 driveup 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 .
104 hotelsmag . com September / October 2021