How can hotel revenue and marketing teams work better together?

Are revenue management and marketing speaking the same language at your hotel? Historically, many hotels have struggled to get these two teams aligned. At the most basic level, they’re both after the same thing: driving more bookings and more revenue for the hotel.

But in the everyday operation, these two teams can sometimes fall into their own silos, reducing the effectiveness of both. Sometimes, there isn’t a dedicated marketing department and the responsibilities are shared by other team members.

So how can hotels improve collaboration between these two teams and boost revenue in the process? 

One of the easiest ways to get your teams aligned is by having them share goals and the responsibility for achieving those goals. Make sure everyone involved in driving revenue (marketing, revenue, sales) understands the monthly, quarterly, and annual goals. You can also consider setting an incentive structure that keeps everyone rowing the same way.

Having your marketing and revenue teams align on key goals is important. Just as important is making a concrete plan and adjusting it to fit the changing needs of your hotel. Email marketing requires that you plan ahead. There are logistics: getting approval for offers, creating copy and design for emails and confirming pricing can all take time. Your Revenue and Marketing teams should plan the email marketing calendar as far in advance as is feasible (a year, ideally). In your marketing calendar, you want to include planned promotions, holidays, and high and low demand dates. Make sure to give yourself deadlines on when to have promotions ready, you might need to have involvement from other teams so having clear follow-up dates for yourself will help the team effort.

When the plan is in place, keep in communication with the Revenue team. Revenue should involve marketing in pricing and customer acquisition strategy. Marketing can provide valuable insights into which customer segments to target, what trends they’re seeing by channel and how best to roll out new offers.

You want to avoid a situation where, for instance, marketing is pushing out a discount promotion at a time when revenue managers are looking to increase rates due to compression. Or maybe the reverse is true and you need to spin up an offer to boost occupancy in the short term to stay on pace for the year. Of course, promotions don’t always equal discounts. Value add offers can also drive bookings and upsells while helping Revenue to build a strong ADR and RevPAR.

If you’d like to learn more about how revenue and marketing can collaborate, check out our webinar, Driving Revenue Together, featuring Lily Mockerman, CEO of Total Customized Revenue Management, Revinate Hospitality Marketing Strategist Mary Margaret Malott and Anisha Yadav, Senior Manager – Hospitality Marketing Strategist at Revinate.