As calendars reset and new budgets go into effect, hotels have a brief but powerful window to turn last year’s performance into smarter strategies. By the time peak seasons arrive, misalignment between revenue management, sales, and marketing becomes far more difficult and costly to correct.
NB: This is an article from TCRM, one of our Expert Partners
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Q1 is the moment when alignment can still be fixed deliberately rather than reactively.
For commercial leaders, this is the time to step back, reassess priorities, and ensure revenue and marketing are working from the same demand narrative.
What Year-End Performance Really Reveals
Year-end performance data highlights more than topline outcomes. While RevPAR, occupancy, ADR, and channel mix tell part of the story, they also expose where execution broke down.
Common signals include:
- Marketing campaigns that generated volume but diluted rate
- Revenue strategies that weren’t clearly supported by marketing efforts
- Heavy reliance on certain channels without incremental profitability
- Missed opportunities to capture demand earlier or more efficiently
- Lack of understanding of how AI is shifting the customer journey
- What worked well that is worth repeating
These patterns are rarely caused by a single decision. More often, they point to gaps in alignment between strategy and execution across the commercial organization.
Why Q1 Is the Best Time to Fix Misalignment
Q1 can offer breathing room in many markets, even as others operate in peak season. For hotels outside of full winter demand, this period provides more predictable patterns and flexibility to recalibrate strategy before the rest of the year accelerates.
This is when hotels can:
- Use trend analysis to study historical data and identify patterns or shifts
- Re-establish shared goals between revenue, sales, and marketing
- Align campaign planning with pricing and demand forecasts
- Reset expectations around channel strategy and budget allocation
- Address inefficiencies before they become structural problems
Waiting until Q2 or Q3 often means fixing issues midstream, when options are limited and it may be too late to recover.
What Commercial Leaders Should Reevaluate in Q1
Rather than treating alignment as a theoretical goal, Q1 is the time to evaluate how revenue and marketing actually work together.
