Beyond the RFP — Why hotels spend $40,000 a year on a 5% win rate

The corporate hotel RFP cycle is the industry's most expensive routine — and it's delivering far less than anyone admits

Every April, hotel sales teams know what's coming. The RFP requests start arriving, inboxes fill up, and the whole process kicks off again. Checking availability, submitting rates, going through negotiation rounds, loading rates into the GDS — and then, silence. Months of work that ends in a handful of won contracts and a long list of polite rejections.

It is one of the most deeply rooted habits in the hotel industry. It is also, if you look at it honestly, one of the least questioned ones.

The numbers tell a hard story. Hotels win between 5 and 7 percent of the RFPs they respond to, according to Knowland's research across more than 1,500 RFP teams. By comparison, the average win rate across all other industries that use the RFP process is 44 percent. Hotels spend an average of $40,100 every year just managing their corporate accounts and distribution agreements. Sales teams put in two to four hours for every single RFP response, and some properties spend two full weeks working through a single cycle.

For most hotels, the return on that investment is close to nothing.

A process that favors hotels already in the program

The corporate RFP cycle runs on a fixed annual schedule. Companies collect their travel data in Q2 and Q3, send out RFPs in August and September, hotels rush to respond within days, and then rounds of negotiation drag through Q4 before rates go live in GDS systems in time for January. The average process takes 76.6 days. In 92 percent of cases, at least one round of negotiation happens before anything is agreed.

The real problem shows up when you look at what all that work actually produces. Roughly 90 percent of hotels in any corporate travel program are hotels that were already in that program the year before — properties that had the business and simply kept it. Michael Laumanns, Accor's VP of Global Corporate Clients, put it plainly: if almost every corporate hotel program re-awards the same hotels year after year, why does the industry go through the full RFP process every twelve months?

"Why is it possible for every other vertical in business travel to run multiyear contracts," Laumanns has asked, "but for hotels, both suppliers and buyers seem to have this love-hate relationship with the RFP process?"

Buyers are asking the same thing. Dan Stagnitta, a travel consultant at Elevance Health, was blunt about it: "I think it's just silliness and busy work to engage in this RFP process where change isn't occurring."

Where the money goes

Cvent's platform handled $16.5 billion in corporate hotel sourcing volume in 2024 — which gives you a sense of how big this exercise really is. But that number hides a more troubling picture. According to ReadyBid's 2025 benchmarks, hotels leave around one in three corporate RFPs unanswered. And 64 percent of hoteliers admit they have no real idea how much revenue they are losing through poorly managed RFP processes.

Fixed rates still make up around 85 percent of all accepted corporate rates — a share that has barely moved despite years of talk about shifting to flexible pricing. That is not entirely unreasonable. Companies want to know what they will pay, and the GBTA–Cvent sourcing report published in August 2025 confirmed that four out of five travel managers always or regularly negotiate fixed rates. But it does mean that an enormous amount of effort goes into negotiating and loading rates that remove pricing flexibility at exactly the moment hotels need it most.

The myth of competition

The real issue is not the RFP process itself — it is the belief that winning new RFPs is the main way to grow corporate revenue.

GBTA CEO Suzanne Neufang is right that formal sourcing does more than just set prices. It helps companies manage risk, track sustainability, and hold suppliers to agreed standards. For large companies moving into new markets, a formal RFP provides structure that a casual negotiation simply cannot. The process has genuine value in the right situations.

But for most hotels — especially independent and mid-market properties that serve a mix of different guest types — the RFP cycle works less as a real competition and more as a yearly routine that moves business between hotels that would have picked it up anyway. Winning a brand new corporate account is rare. The cost of trying is not.

The real price is the time and attention pulled away from the channels and strategies that are actually growing. Corporate travel spending hit $1.47 trillion in 2024 and is on track to reach $1.70 trillion in 2026. GDS has quietly overtaken direct channels as the biggest single source of corporate hotel bookings. New travel management platforms are pulling hotel inventory from multiple sources at once. Flexible pricing is gaining ground in smaller markets.

And according to Amadeus, 40 percent of all corporate bookings through the GDS now include a leisure component — meaning the line between business and leisure travel is blurring fast, with real consequences for how hotels price and position themselves for corporate guests.

Every hour a sales team spends chasing a 5 percent win rate is an hour not spent on any of those opportunities.

What new hotels are really up against

For a hotel entering the corporate RFP market for the first time — a new opening, a recently renamed property, or an independent hotel stepping into managed travel — the odds are even tougher than the overall numbers suggest.

The 5 to 7 percent win rate is an industry average. For a hotel with no existing corporate relationships, the realistic expectation in year one is at the lower end of that range. Because travel managers tend to renew existing hotel relationships year after year, the number of open spots for new hotels in any RFP season is genuinely small. They usually appear only where a company is adding new coverage, a current preferred hotel has underperformed, or a new office location has no hotel agreements in place yet.

None of this means new hotels should not go after RFPs. It means they should go after them with honest expectations and a clear process for deciding which ones are worth pursuing — not by replying to every bid that arrives.

For hotels just starting out, year one should be measured not by how many contracts are won but by how many useful relationships are built. Getting onto a shortlist, receiving feedback after an unsuccessful bid, and becoming known to procurement teams and travel agency contacts — these are investments that pay off in year two and year three. The position that keeps existing hotels in a program is built up over several seasons. It cannot be created with a single strong response.

A well-prepared hotel in its first RFP season should expect to win a small number of programs — most likely in accounts where it has a clear advantage in location or product over hotels already in the program. That is not a bad result. It is the foundation from which a real corporate segment grows, as long as the programs that are won are managed well enough to build the relationships that make the following seasons easier.

The only question that matters

The RFP is not the problem. The assumption that it is a strategy is.

For hotels that have been working with corporate accounts for years, the key question heading into the 2026/27 RFP season is not how to win more RFPs. It is whether the effort going into the annual cycle is matched by real investment in the channels, pricing models, and distribution relationships that are now generating most corporate bookings. Having existing business is an advantage — but a quiet one. It protects revenue already earned. It does not create new revenue. And it does nothing for the 61 percent of business travelers who will skip the managed program entirely and simply book wherever is easiest.

The answer for established hotels is not to stop doing RFPs — it is to rebalance. Keep the programs that bring in real volume. Protect the relationships in accounts where the business justifies it. But stop putting hours into low-probability bids — the RFPs from companies with no nearby office, the markets where your rate cannot compete, the renewals for relationships that would continue regardless — and redirect that time into the distribution and pricing work that actually moves the needle.

For hotels new to the process, the challenge is different but just as clear. The RFP cycle is set up in a way that makes it harder for newcomers. Understanding that from the start is useful, not discouraging. It means you can stop measuring success by win rate and start measuring it by the things that matter: a complete profile before the first RFP arrives, a clear decision before every response, quality bids over a high volume of them, and relationships with people who will remember a straightforward, honest proposal long after they have forgotten a generic one. The hotels that are well established in corporate programs three years from now are the ones treating this RFP season not as a quick revenue opportunity but as the beginning of something longer.

Both paths lead to the same place: a corporate rate strategy built on more than an annual calendar, based on more than fixed rates, and measured by more than the number of bids submitted. That is what this series is about.

Next in this series: GDS Is Winning the Corporate Distribution War

by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today

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