“It's time to bring direct booking to hotel sales teams.”

For years, hotels have invested heavily in building direct booking strategies for leisure guests — polished websites, targeted paid ads, social media campaigns, SEO, retargeting — all designed to capture and convert travelers before they ever click an OTA link. But there’s a missing piece in the conversation: the sales team.

We talk about “owning the guest relationship,” yet for group and event business, we often rely on third-party platforms like Cvent, venue marketplaces, and DMCs to bring planners to our door. The irony is that we’ve built a finely tuned machine for leisure direct bookings, but haven’t applied the same level of thought, creativity, or investment to the direct booking strategy for meetings and events. That gap is becoming even more critical in today’s world of AI-powered planning.

Planners are increasingly using AI tools to pre-qualify hotels, scrape websites for specs and imagery, compare floor plans, and even draft their RFPs before ever speaking to a human. If our sales teams aren’t armed with a robust, direct-first strategy — a dedicated meetings website, compelling and searchable content, virtual site tours, transparent packages, and targeted marketing directly to corporate planners and associations — we’re at risk of being filtered out by the very tools they use to “shortlist” us.

The goal isn’t to replace the personal touch that wins business, but to meet planners earlier in their journey, before they’ve narrowed options using third-party sites. Just as we’ve learned that a well-designed leisure website beats an OTA page in telling our story, a well-built meetings and events hub beats a generic Cvent listing every time.

Imagine if sales teams had the same arsenal as leisure marketing — paid campaigns targeting planners who have sourced in our market before, email nurturing sequences for cold leads, content that speaks directly to industries we serve best, and a CRM that connects all of it. That’s how we reduce dependency on intermediaries and own the relationship from the start.

AI isn’t going away; in fact, it’s getting smarter. The hotels that win will be the ones that build an equally intelligent direct booking strategy for sales — one that makes us discoverable, relevant, and memorable before a planner even hits “send” on an RFP. Just as we transformed leisure marketing by owning our digital presence, it’s time to transform group sales the same way.

The tools are there. The audience is out there. What’s missing is the mindset shift to treat group and event business with the same direct-first urgency we’ve mastered on the leisure side.