2025 was a very interesting year for our business. Overall, it’s not bad, but there are issues for sure. The US has dipped in profitability for the second year in a row; Europe and Asia are stagnant, while the Middle East is growing slightly. This is related to a wide array of factors influencing operational costs, demand levels and how high rates can be squeezed.

Many years ago, when I was reviewing and approving budgets for hotels, I couldn’t ever accept anything less than 5% year on year as we would need to cover inflation, add more revenue to the operator and appease the owner. And that is typically still the norm. But if your whole market, city and comp set are barely managing to stay even, what can you do to get to the desired growth levels?

As hotels continue to evolve in every way to meet service standards while facing operational issues, investing in key business areas is crucial for growth. However, this is not a one-size-fits-all.

Would you take money and boost your online visibility? Would you invest in a new tool that can help you maximize conversion from your website? Would you plug in an AI chatbot onto your site to help engage with direct customers better? Is it time to change your website to better AI-enhanced images and videos? Maybe you push social marketing to drive traffic to your booking engine again? Or maybe invest in an AI revenue management platform that allows you to shop your competitors to yield every single drop of revenue possible?

Technology is out there, allowing hotels to stay ahead of the curve with its tools. The world is moving forward, and operators need to keep up. But you need to do so with a high level of scrutiny to ensure you don’t overdo it, don’t overspend, don’t pile on the tools -and overwhelm your teams- and to keep funds to use for your offline channels.

If your hotel is a small property, a property-built tech stack driving online distribution and conversion, whether direct or through third parties, should do the trick. You can sit back and relax.

But with larger and more complicated hotels, this is where the good old-fashioned way of making sales comes in. Without a solid base to your business levels, it doesn’t matter how much technology and AI you throw at the growth problem: it simply won’t do. You need a base off which to yield. You need different source markets to cover all seasons and days of the week, meetings to fill up those spaces and for them to go and eat lunch in your all-day dining. You need leisure clients to use your wellness facilities and business travelers to buy your executive rooms while entertaining clients with food and drinks at night. A wide range of clients is needed to make a hotel’s business both resilient and optimized for maximum revenue potential.

Globally, the size of sales and events teams has been shrinking in recent years smaller a global trend driven by the declining share of business they’ve contributed in recent years, along with the rise of high-yielding direct online bookings. But your sales team could be a silver lining now more than ever.

You need these ladies & gentlemen at the top of their game, hunting for leads, developing client relationships, maximizing market share and growing the conversion ratios from all the leads that are coming in. The problem is that many of these teams are understaffed, overworked, undertrained and outgunned by their clients in a huge way and in most cases are set up to fail.

The clients that they talk to, whether corporate, leisure, MICE, Government, Airlines or any other, are far sharper than they were 5, 10 or 20 years ago. They are more experienced. They have way more choices of destinations and choice of hotels within each destination. They have access to information that they will use to get what they want. Your clients are harder to catch, harder to keep and harder to please than ever before.

Many of your salespeople are acting in a capacity of order takers, budget asking, answering machines, system administrators and proposal sending admins. Because of the constant pressure on them to perform, the many demands on their time, their lack of experience in many cases and also a reduced investment in training, they do not know how to set their priorities right, they don’t build rapport in the right way, don’t qualify clients effectively and as such end up being less successful.

Investing in this area of business as well as your own time with these teams, giving them support, ensuring they are trained and rewarded properly when they exceed expectations, could make a huge difference to your hotel’s commercial success. This, along with your tech stack, will push your numbers higher than your comp set and guarantee that, even if your whole market collapses, your hotel will always outperform others around you.

Story contributed by Tareq Bagaeen, senior consultant at HotStats and founder of aQedina.com.