The Moment
Every sales team treats the RFP like the starting gun. A new analysis from Amadeus Hospitality suggests the race was already run. Corporate buyers increasingly rule out properties they have no prior familiarity with, long before a single document goes out for bid, and 63.1 percent of hotels now say finding genuinely qualified leads, not just more leads, is their top obstacle.
The report also found that 54.3% of hotels consider sharing data and account intelligence between sales and revenue management the most important factor in winning group business. Meanwhile, roughly 30% say rapidly qualifying which leads are worth chasing is the single area of the RFP process most in need of improvement.
Put plainly, a lot of hotels are still trying to win business at the exact moment they should have already won it.
A couple of ways to check where your own property stands before the next wave lands:
- 1 Pull the corporate accounts and repeat groups that came up for renewal this year, and ask how many of them heard from your team before they had to ask first.
- 2 Ask your sales and revenue management leads how account intelligence actually moves between them today, whether that is a shared system or a hallway conversation that only happens when someone remembers.
If your team has already solved for this, I want to know how.
Party Trends
The Amadeus report frames this as a shift from rate-focused negotiation to what it calls a data-first approach, and the number worth sitting with is roughly 30 percent, the share of hotels that say rapid lead qualification, telling a real opportunity from a form fill, is the part of their RFP process most in need of fixing. A property can have flawless pricing and a beautiful proposal template and still lose, simply because it spent the qualifying window guessing.
The properties winning quietly ahead of RFP season are not doing anything exotic. They are just already known to the buyer by the time the request goes out.
When was the last time your property showed up in a corporate buyer's inbox before they had a reason to go looking for you?
Behind the Curtain
Most sales floors already have more data than they know what to do with. The uncomfortable part of this report is that almost none of it gets organized around the one thing that would actually shorten the qualifying window, a property's own history with the account sitting in front of them.
A corporate buyer or planner who already stayed with you twice, who already knows your ballroom and your banquet team, should never look like a cold lead in your pipeline. Yet without a system built to surface that history automatically, it often does, buried across a CRM and whatever the last sales manager happened to remember before they left.
This is the exact gap Relivable is built to close, surfacing a property's own guest and account history so a returning buyer shows up already qualified instead of starting the RFP process from zero. Pre-season visibility comes down to knowing, instantly, who you have already earned, long before marketing spend enters the picture.
I'm the founder of Relivable, built for hotels and event venues that generate a ton of valuable information and do almost nothing with it. Every event leaves behind content, data, and insight. Our AI organizes it, finds the patterns, and makes it useful across your entire operation.
Intelligence for every event decision. → relivable.comThe Party Report
Travis Breen takes the role at the historic Austin property, bringing more than 25 years of hospitality experience from Kimpton, YOTEL, and Piatt Hotel Group. A new name on the sales roster is as good a reason as any to ask whether your own account history follows the person or walks out the door with them.
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