Setting up a hotel sales department: roles, targets and a weekly routine

A hotel sales department is the team that turns named buyers, agencies, tour operators, companies and meeting planners, into signed contracts and repeat business. It owns accounts, group and corporate bookings, contract renewals and market intelligence, and it works to a weekly routine of calls, visits, follow-up and a one-page monthly report.

In a mid-sized hotel, one person signs the agency contracts, answers group requests, books the fair stand and writes the social posts. Nobody, including the owner, can say what the sales job actually is, so nobody can tell whether it is being done. This article fixes that: what the department delivers, how many people it needs at three sizes of hotel, who decides what between sales, reservations and revenue, how to set targets, what a sales week looks like, and what goes in the monthly report.

What does a hotel sales department actually deliver?#

Four outputs: signed accounts, group and corporate business on the books, contracts that stay current, and market intelligence the owner can act on. Everything else, from advertising to answering the phone, belongs to another team.

An account is a named buyer with a contract, a rate and a contact person: a travel agency, a tour operator, a company, a meeting planner. If nobody in the hotel can name the buyer, there is no account. There is only a booking that arrived from somewhere.

Groups and series are dated requests converted into confirmed bookings, with deposit terms, cut-off dates and a rooming list owner written down before the confirmation goes out. Contracts mean rate agreements, allotments, release periods, payment terms and renewal dates kept in one place, so a rate cannot quietly expire while the agency keeps selling it.

Market intelligence is the fourth output: who is buying, what they pay, what they asked for and did not get, which quote was lost and to what, and which segment is softening before it shows in the occupancy figure. This is the part owners most often go without, and the part that helps most when a season turns.

Just as important is what the department is not. It is not the reservations desk, which takes bookings that already exist. It is not marketing, which owns brand, content and advertising. It is not revenue management, which owns price and inventory decisions. A practical test for any task: if it produces no named buyer, no signed terms and no usable market information, it is probably not sales work.

The department also owns the relationship after the signature: the review call, the production conversation, the renewal. A contract nobody services is a contract that lapses.

How many people does a hotel sales department need?#

It depends on room count, on which segments the hotel actually sells to, and on whether groups and meetings are part of the mix. There is no norm, only a trade-off between coverage and control.

At the smallest size, sales is a defined part of one person's week, usually the owner or the general manager, with fixed hours and a written list of accounts. The risk is that the work disappears the first busy week. At the middle size, one dedicated person covers agencies, corporate accounts and group requests, and reservations stays separate so that quoting and booking do not compete for the same hours. At the larger size, the work splits by segment or by geography, because an agency buyer and a corporate buyer need different conversations, different calendars and different paperwork.

Whatever the size, name a single owner for each account. Shared ownership of an account is the same as no ownership. And keep the quoting trail in one place: the request, the rate given, who approved it, and the date. This discipline matters more than the number of people.

The headcount suggestions below are examples to react to, not benchmarks. Your segment mix decides.

Caption: illustrative examples, not industry norms.

For the wider picture of where sales sits among the other departments, see the hotel organisation chart: departments, roles and who decides what.

Who decides what: sales, reservations or revenue?#

Sales proposes and revenue approves. The person who negotiates a rate should not be the person who signs it off, or the discount becomes a habit rather than a decision.

A corporate or agency rate is proposed by sales with the account's production and potential attached, and approved by revenue or the GM against a written floor. Accepting a group is a displacement question: revenue checks what the group takes out of the calendar before sales confirms anything to the client. Allotment size and release period are inventory decisions, so revenue sets the ceiling and sales agrees the number with the agency inside it.

Discounts beyond published policy, and contract values above a threshold the owner sets, go to the owner or GM in writing. The threshold is what keeps the escalation from becoming a negotiation every time. Stop sale, closing a date and overbooking rules belong to revenue alone: sales can argue the case, but it does not open or close inventory. Reservations owns accuracy, meaning the booking, the deposit, the cut-off and the rooming list. Sales owns the relationship that produced it.

Write the split down once, on one page, and give it to all three functions. Most conflicts here are not disagreements about policy, they are disagreements about who was supposed to decide.

How do you set targets by account and segment?#

Set them in room nights and revenue, by segment, and then by account for the accounts that actually move the number. Activity counts are a management tool, not a target.

Start with segment codes, so that a room night is counted once and in the right place. Without them, every target conversation becomes an argument about definitions. The setup is described in hotel market segmentation: how to set up segment codes. Set a segment target first: what each segment must produce, and what it produced last year after cancellations and no-shows, not at the moment of booking.

Then set account targets for the accounts that carry the segment. An account target needs three numbers: what it produced, what it could produce, and what you are asking it to do. Separate new business from repeat business, because a single blended target hides the fact that the base is shrinking while new accounts are being signed. Rank partners by what they really bring after cancellations, complaints and payment behaviour, not by the volume they claim; the agency production report: ranking partners by what they really bring covers this in detail.

Review quarterly, not monthly. A month is noise; a quarter shows whether the account is developing. When an account misses, the first question is what changed on their side, not what changed in the discount.

What does a hotel sales week look like?#

One fixed shape, repeated: pipeline on Monday, visits midweek, follow-up and quoting on Thursday, reporting on Friday. The routine is the job; the visits are what fill it.

On Monday, read the pipeline, list every open request with its decision date, and decide which three accounts get attention this week and why. Midweek belongs to visits and calls, clustered by geography so that travel time does not eat the day. One visit is worth several emails, but only if it is prepared. On Thursday, quotes go out, follow-ups get done, and every conversation is logged with a next action and a date. A note without a next date is a diary entry, not a pipeline. On Friday, write the week's numbers, the new accounts touched, the quotes still open, and the two things that need the GM or the owner.

Keep a follow-up ladder: quote sent, a check after two days, a second after a week, a third after three weeks, then a polite close. Most lost business is lost to silence, not to price. Log the reason a quote was lost in plain words; after a quarter, those reasons are the most useful document the department owns.

Any tool works if it holds the account, the contact, the last conversation and the next date. A shared sheet does this. A system nobody updates does not.

How do you prepare for and report on a sales visit?#

Prepare one page about the account, ask three questions you cannot answer from your own system, and write the report the same day, while the details are still exact.

Before the visit, gather the account's production, what they buy, what they complained about last season, who else they sell, and what you are asking for. One page, no deck. Leave behind a fact sheet the buyer can forward internally: location, room types, capacity, meeting space, season, distances, and the contact who answers. Buyers resell you to someone you will never meet; the hotel fact sheet: what agencies and tour operators expect on one page explains what belongs on it.

Ask what they are selling more of, what their clients ask for that they cannot supply, and what would make them send you one more booking. Those three answers are worth more than any presentation. Report within the day: who you met, what they said, what they asked for, what you promised, the next action and its date. A report written a week later is a summary of an impression.

When the answer is no, write down the reason as they said it, not as you interpreted it, and set a date to come back. Track visits against outcomes over a quarter. If visits produce nothing, change the visit list, not the number of visits.

What belongs in the monthly report to the owner?#

One page, six lines, and one decision the owner has to make. Anything longer does not get read, and anything without a decision does not get acted on.

The six lines are fixed. Production against target by segment, in room nights and revenue, with the same definition of production every month. The top accounts and their movement: who grew, who fell, who has not sent anything and has been asked why. Contracts signed, contracts expiring in the next ninety days, and the renewal owner for each. The open pipeline of group and corporate requests, with value, decision date, and what is blocking each one. What changed in the market that the owner should know: a new competitor selling the same account, a segment asking for something the hotel does not have, a price that is no longer accepted. And one decision the owner must make this month, stated as a question with two options and the sales person's recommendation.

Keep the same six lines every month. Comparability is the whole value of a monthly report.

What to do next#

Write the one page first: who owns each account, who approves which decision, and what the weekly routine is. Then set segment and account targets on top of it, and let the monthly report test whether the routine is working. The yearly plan for selling to the trade and the full organisation chart are separate jobs; this one is the team, and it starts with a single written page.