The Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International’s (HSMAI) Commercial Strategy Week, which is taking place in Toronto from June 26 to 29, is expected to bring together hotel marketing and revenue optimization professionals for a series of educational and networking events.
“They should expect the most robust agenda of trends and best practices that have been assembled for marketing and revenue professionals,” said Bob Gilbert, president/CEO, HSMAI.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the organization providing educational conferences focused on marketing and revenue optimization.
The HSMAI Marketing Strategy Conference on June 27 will address the global trends and evolving customers and how they’re affecting hotel marketers; discuss what the future holds for marketing in hotels; and explore the best practices to sharpen everyday skills.
On June 28, HSMAI ROC Americas will delve into the latest traveler trends and insights; discuss travel data for maximizing revenue; address the global economic challenges and what these factors mean for hotels and travel; and share the best communication practices in the workplace.
“These are two events where we take the emerging trends in each discipline and go an inch wide and a mile deep,” he said. “We’re expecting record attendance this year. We broke records last year—85% of the hotel attendees at these two one-day events for HSMAI are all corporate regional people from the brands, management companies and ownership groups.”
The ROC conference has been colocated with HITEC for 20 years. “It’s a great opportunity for the revenue professionals to come together,” said Gilbert. “We also give them a free pass to attend the HITEC trade show. A lot of them will connect with their chief technology officers or chief information officers, and watch the show together. That’s really a win-win for us, as well as the HFTP folks at HITEC, because it promotes the fact that technology and revenue needs to work together to make better decisions about what they’re going to embrace from a technology perspective.”
These two events are bookended by six executive roundtables. “On Monday, we have three roundtables for the brands’ chief distribution officers,” he said. “We have a second one for the brands’ chief digital officers and a third one for the chief digital officers of management companies.”
On the fourth day of Commercial Strategy Week, three more roundtables are held. “We have the chief revenue officers from hotel brands, and we’ve got about 20 brands represented at that roundtable. We bring together the chief revenue officers from management companies, and we’re at 29. We do a third roundtable on Thursday for the ownership group commercial executives. These are asset managers at different ownership groups that typically oversee what we call the commercial function within their ownership group meaning they’re looking after the analytics and the trends behind what’s happening in sales, marketing, revenue, loyalty and distribution, at all the hotels in their portfolio.”
