By Daniel Craig, Founder and Chief Content Strategist, Reknown Marketing

The next big leap for hotels may not be a new product or platform, but what’s happening behind the scenes: deeper collaboration across commercial functions.

Collaboration fuels innovation, problem-solving, relationship building, and shared achievements, all while supporting individual growth. Yet meaningful collaboration has grown harder, with remote work and leaner staffing driving teams further apart.

Slowly, that’s changing, and it started during the pandemic. By 2021, nearly 80% of workers worldwide reported using collaboration tools, up from just over half in 2019, according to Gartner. Now, advances in hospitality technology are setting the stage for a new era of cooperation across sales, marketing, and revenue management.

But this isn’t the type of collaboration many of us remember from our early days in hotels. It’s digital-first, data-driven, and AI-enabled.

Operations: A Model for Collaboration

For inspiration, hotel teams need look no further than operations. When I was a GM, most collaboration happened offline: frequent meetings, logbooks, memos, manual forms, and a whole lot of Post-it notes.

Somehow it all worked (usually), but it was inefficient and prone to errors, leading to miscommunications, irate guests, and occasional tears.

Today, operations teams have a growing array of software to enhance collaboration, from task management platforms like Flexkeeping and hotelkit to guest engagement tools like Whistle and HiJiffy. These tools centralize information and automate workflows, with knowledge libraries, checklists, SOPs, alerts, and social media-style features.

Connected to the PMS, they bring together front desk, guest services, housekeeping, and maintenance teams without the need for constant in-person meetings. While there are still the odd tears, operations run far more smoothly.

Why Commercial Collaboration Still Lags Behind

Meanwhile, the commercial side of the hotel business looks much like it did twenty years ago when I was a DOSM. That’s not for a lack of will to change. In recent years, calls for better alignment across sales, marketing, and revenue management have led some organizations to consolidate these functions under a single leader.

But deep collaboration across commercial teams remains held back by scattered locations, differing software systems, poor connectivity, and misaligned performance metrics.

Let’s break it down:

● Revenue management: Works from an RMS and channel manager. KPIs focus on occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, market indexes, and, for advanced hotels, NetRevPAR, GOPPAR, and TrevPAR.

● Marketing: Uses a CRM and various tools for SEO, social, and ad campaigns. KPIs include website and email performance, social media engagement, conversion rates, ROAS, loyalty, and reputation.

● Sales: Relies on sales & catering software and a CRM (often a different system or module from marketing). Performance is measured by prospecting activity, sales quotas, and revenue generated at both individual and team levels.

Instead of fostering teamwork, this often drives departments further apart, resulting in misaligned objectives, poor communication, and delayed responses to revenue opportunities. Profitability, arguably the most important metric, is often overlooked in day-to-day decision-making and performance measurement.

Tech Advances Enabling Closer Collaboration

Generic collaboration tools like Slack, Google Workspace, Zoom, HubSpot, and Salesforce have helped fill the gap, but they aren’t purpose-built for the unique needs of hotel commercial teams.

Now, however, we’re seeing exciting innovations in hospitality technology. The shift to cloud technology, open APIs, modular system design, and enhanced connectivity is giving tech providers more flexibility to build new products and integrate platforms.

Some solutions have emerged from the recent wave of M&A activity, while others—fittingly—are the result of collaborations and partnerships between tech providers who recognize they’re all in this together.

The result: data flows more smoothly between systems and teams, breaking down silos and providing a holistic view of guest profiles and hotel performance, paving the way for deeper collaboration.

A New Generation of Collaboration Tools Built for Hotels

Below are just a few of the solutions helping hotel commercial teams collaborate more effectively to drive revenue and profitability. Importantly, these tools aren’t limited to large hotels and brands; many are affordable and practical for small, independent hotels too.

1. Marketing and Revenue Management
Marketing and revenue teams have long operated in parallel universes. Revenue shares vast amounts of data in weekly reports, but marketing often struggles to extract what matters most. Revenue meetings rarely allow enough time to bridge the gap.

New tools are finally changing that dynamic:

● IDeaS Spotlight. Launched in April, Spotlight was designed specifically to put curated forecast data and revenue insights into the hands of marketing teams. It highlights periods of need, helping align marketing campaigns with real-time demand to maximize occupancy and revenue.

● Cloudbeds Intelligence. At ITB Berlin, Cloudbeds introduced the concept of “revenue marketing”—the unification of revenue and marketing strategies through causal AI. The Cloudbeds Intelligence platform empowers hotels to optimize pricing and marketing actions together, creating a single, holistic strategy.

2. Sales and Marketing
Collaboration between sales and marketing is often inconsistent, depending largely on how well the teams work together. Yet it’s critical for aligning brand messaging, targeting the right audiences, and converting demand into revenue.

Several tools are helping to bridge the divide, including:

● Cendyn’s eInsight CRM. When integrated with Cendyn’s eProposal and ePlanner, eInsight connects guest profile management and campaign automation to sales enablement tools. Sales teams can manage RFPs, customize proposals, and track group business pipelines—all while working from the same database as marketing.

● Ireckonu’s Middleware. Ireckonu pulls guest data from the PMS, POS, spa software, and other systems into a single, unified guest profile. This ensures both sales and marketing teams have consistent, up-to-date information to work from, reducing duplication and improving personalization.

3. Revenue Management and Distribution
Fragmented systems and manual processes often leave revenue and distribution teams out of sync, leading to missed opportunities and inconsistent pricing. Better data sharing and collaboration tools can help overcome these hurdles.

● SiteMinder’s Dynamic Revenue Plus. Built in partnership with IDeaS, this mobile-first platform integrates real-time market intelligence with dynamic pricing recommendations. It allows hotel teams to respond faster to market changes, adjust rates, manage inventory, and optimize distribution strategy—all on the go.

4. Marketing and Distribution
When marketing and distribution teams work together, promotional campaigns are better aligned with live pricing, inventory, and channel strategies to drive stronger results.

● D-EDGE. Born from the merger of Fastbooking and Availpro, D-EDGE is uniquely positioned to align digital marketing campaigns with distribution strategies via an integrated CRS platform. Following the company’s recent acquisition of LoungeUp, the platform will soon also feature CRM functionality.

5. Revenue Management and Sales
Separate KPIs and conflicting incentives often create friction between sales and revenue teams. Sales focuses on hitting individual quotas; revenue managers look to optimize overall yield.

While aligning these departments is probably above any tech provider’s pay grade, one tool is helping bring their goals closer together.

● Group pricing tools. Historically, group pricing has been more art than science, guided by rough benchmarks and gut instinct. Tools from Duetto, IDeaS, and more recently RoomPriceGenie (for smaller independents) apply the same advanced analytics used for transient rates to enable smarter, data-driven group decisions.

AI: The Newest Member of the Commercial Team

Given all the hype it receives these days, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention AI. Many collaboration tools already bake in AI, but generative AI adds a whole new layer.

When used properly, tools like ChatGPT and Claude can serve as virtual commercial team members—helping brainstorm ideas, fine-tune strategies, and craft campaign messaging that supports overall commercial objectives, not just individual departments.

It Takes a Village: Building a Culture of Collaboration

Technology is only the foundation of meaningful collaboration. Hotel companies must also prioritize:

● Leadership & culture – Promote shared KPIs and discourage data hoarding by fostering transparency and teamwork.

● Interoperability – Choose vendors and systems that support open APIs and modularity to enhance connectivity.

● Diverse teams – Bring together data scientists, strategists, leaders, and tacticians to enrich collaboration.

● Training & incentives – Develop cross-functional skills and reward collaboration with team targets and incentives tied to profitability, not just revenue.

Finally, while digital tools can streamline collaboration, they should complement—not replace—focused, well-run in-person meetings that build trust and spark ideas.

Collaboration: The Real Competitive Edge

The future of hotel tech isn’t just about shiny new products and features; it’s also about smart, connected collaboration.

With more tech partnerships and M&A activity on the horizon—including recent acquisitions by Lighthouse of The Hotels Network and by Cvent of Prismm—we can expect even more innovations to bridge the divide across commercial teams.