What's left of hotel sales: One buyer became ten
The buyer the team was built to serve is now one of ten. The team is still serving one
A DOSM sits down on a Monday morning and reviews the previous week's group inquiries. Ten of them. They span a corporate procurement team running an annual rate-program negotiation, an HR director sourcing a quarterly offsite for a distributed workforce, a brand marketing manager scoping a product launch event, a founder running a leadership retreat for a fifteen-person company, a creator agency placing a hosted stay in exchange for content, an association chapter organizing a half-day workshop, a developer relations team booking a hackathon, an enterprise sales kickoff whose spec reads more like a film shoot than a meeting, a wellness operator block-booking yoga retreats, and a venture firm running a small-format founder summit.
Ten inquiries. Ten different buyer types. One playbook.
This is the contradiction the existing group sales structure has not absorbed. The function was built around a specific buyer with predictable patterns. That buyer is one of many now, and the team designed to serve them has not been redesigned to serve the rest.
The buyer the team was built for
The corporate planner with an annual RFP cycle was the archetype that taught a generation of hotel sellers what selling groups meant. Their procurement was trained. Their specs were standard. Their decision cycle was predictable — the RFP went out at roughly the same time every year, the negotiation followed a known shape, the contracts looked recognizable across the industry. They came back, often to the same property, often with similar volume, often with the same handful of negotiation points to settle.
This buyer made the entire economic logic of the group sales department work. Account managers could maintain relationships year over year because the relationship had a calendar. Sales coordinators could work at scale because the inputs were standard. The DOSM could plan a year of revenue because pace and conversion behaved roughly the same way they did the year before. Hotel sales technology — CRM, RFP automation, lead scoring, account management workflows — was designed around how this buyer worked.
That buyer still exists. They are no longer the dominant one in most markets.
Where the buyer went
A few structural shifts happened in parallel.
Distributed work changed the corporate gathering pattern. Companies that used to meet through the office now have to gather through the calendar. The output is more meetings, often smaller, with shorter lead times and less procurement infrastructure behind them. An HR director booking quarterly offsites for a forty-person engineering team is doing something the company did not do at all a decade ago, and is doing it without the corporate travel discipline that supported the old planner role.
Marketing budgets absorbed event spending that used to sit elsewhere. Brand activations, product launches, content shoots, creator-driven campaigns — these sit inside marketing org charts now and are run by marketing managers. Their procurement logic is creative-led, not travel-led. They care about visual context, story, photo opportunities, and timeline alignment with a campaign. They will pay above market for the right venue and walk away from the wrong one without negotiating. Internal events have started behaving the same way — enterprise sales kickoffs, all-hands gatherings, and hackathons increasingly look more like content productions than meetings.
Creator and influencer programs scaled into a category of their own. A creator agency placing twelve hosted stays a quarter is buying differently from any traditional planner. The hotel is not being paid for the room. The hotel is paying — in room nights and in services — for content. The negotiation is about deliverables, audience profile, content rights, and exclusivity, not about rate.
Founder-led and small-company gatherings became normal. A fifteen-person company runs leadership retreats, kickoffs, and offsites that a comparable company twenty years ago would not have run. These buyers have no procurement function, often book inside two weeks, and frequently negotiate directly with the GM rather than the sales team.
Communities and association chapters shifted toward smaller, more frequent gatherings. The annual association conference is still a buyer. Around it, a different kind of group buyer has multiplied — chapter meetings, member events, professional community workshops, founder dinners, industry breakfast briefings. Each is small. Together they are not.
In each case, the buyer is real, the volume is real, and the procurement logic does not match the playbook the sales team was trained on.
What the playbook keeps getting wrong
Hotel sales teams keep responding to these buyers with the framework built for the old one. The lead is qualified by the RFP-era criteria — number of room nights, F&B spend, timing, decision authority. The proposal is structured like a corporate-planner proposal — rate ladder, attrition, cancellation terms, F&B minimums. The follow-up cadence assumes a multi-week procurement cycle. The CRM is configured for an account-management relationship that will recur next year.
Most of these new buyers do not match any of those assumptions.
The HR offsite buyer often has no idea what attrition means and finds the contract intimidating. The brand activation buyer does not care about the rate ladder; they care about whether the venue can hold the production setup. The creator agency is not running an RFP at all. The founder does not want a proposal — they want a quick yes or no with a clear price. The community organizer is volunteering their time and cannot wait three days for a follow-up.
When the team responds to these buyers with the corporate-planner playbook, conversion suffers, the cycle lengthens, and the buyer often goes elsewhere — frequently to a venue type the hotel does not consider competition: a coworking space with event capacity, a private members' club, a residential rental with a chef, a content production studio with overnight rooms. The hotel is not losing the business to a comp-set property. The hotel is losing it because the comp set is not where the buyer was looking.
This is the dynamic asset managers describe when they say group revenue is harder to grow than it should be. Effort is rising. Conversion is flat or falling. Average booking size is declining. The team is working through more leads to reach the same target, and the leads themselves are arriving in a shape the team is not staffed to handle.
The team that did not multiply
The team structure has not adjusted. A DOSM, two or three sales managers, a coordinator, perhaps a catering specialist — this is roughly what a typical group sales team looks like at a full-service hotel, and it is roughly what it looked like fifteen years ago. The team was sized to serve one buyer at one cycle. The market is now ten buyers at ten cycles, with ten different procurement logics, and the team is responding to all of them through one workflow.
Hiring more sellers is rarely the answer. The shape of the work has changed, not just the volume. Selling to a creator agency requires a different skill set than selling to a corporate planner. Selling to a brand activation manager requires understanding production, not procurement. Selling to a founder requires speed and judgment, not process. The team needs to be specialized, not just scaled — and that is a much harder organizational change than adding headcount.
Most hotels have not made that change. The team in 2026 looks like the team in 2010, with more inquiries, more channels, and more buyer types arriving through each.
The verdict
This is why so much of the trade-press conversation about underperforming group sales reads as if it were written for a market that ended a decade ago. Better discipline on RFP follow-up does not help when most of the new buyers were never going to send an RFP. Better activity tracking does not help when the activity that matters is no longer in the CRM. Better account management does not help when most of the new buyers are not coming back next year — they are coming back, if at all, as a different buyer with a different need.
Hotel sales was built for one buyer. The buyer became ten. The team did not.
Next in the series: What's left of hotel sales: The impossible job at the top.
by Markus Busch, Editor/Publisher Hospitality.today
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