There is a moment in every industry shift when the people paying attention stop asking "is this really happening?" and start asking "how fast?"
For hotel sales, that moment is now.
Nickole Valdov, Vice President of Sales for Full Service at Aimbridge Hospitality, one of the world's largest hotel management companies, is not someone who softens the landing. On a recent episode of the Sales on Tap podcast, she sat down with sales consultant Celeste Berke and hotel marketing strategist Cory Falter to talk about what the next two to three years will look like for hotel sellers. Not the optimistic version. The real one.
"AI's not gonna take your job," Valdov said, "but an excited, curious salesperson that uses AI will take your job."
That is the frame. Everything else follows from it.
Here is the stat that should be hanging on the wall of every hotel sales office… the industry average win rate on a CVENT RFP is five to seven percent.
Five to seven percent. 👀
That means for roughly every twenty proposals a seller spends time building, pricing, formatting, and submitting, they win one. Maybe. The rest is administrative output that produces nothing except the illusion of activity.
Now layer on this: AI RFP tools are already in development and coming to market.
Berke has been in conversations with two of them. These tools respond to RFPs in three to five minutes versus the current industry average of thirty-five to forty minutes. They do not negotiate against themselves. They do not shave five dollars off the rate to "earn" the business. They use the system, hold the rate, and drive higher ADR precisely because the human instinct to discount is removed from the equation.
"The current RFP system is on life support," Valdov said. "It's gonna be gone before 2030. That's probably a 2027 evolution."
Ownership groups are already doing the math. If an AI tool is handling RFP response, the obvious question lands on every Director of Sales' desk: what exactly are the sellers doing with their time? It is not a hostile question. It is a structural one. And the honest answer, for most teams right now, is that they are reacting to a firehose of inbound volume, leaving no bandwidth to actually prospect.
"I'm inundated replying to RFPs. I can't even do this," one DOS told Berke recently. That is not a personal failure. It is a system design problem. And the system is about to be redesigned whether teams are ready or not.
While sellers have been focused on RFP response time as a KPI, something quieter has been happening upstream.
Non-professional planners, the executive assistant booking the leadership offsite, the HR manager organizing the annual conference, the small business owner planning a client event, are no longer starting their search with a phone call or a CVENT submission. They are going to AI search engines to build their shortlist before they contact anyone at all.
Berke has run this exercise at two conferences. She puts hotel teams in front of an AI search tool and asks them to look for their own property. Many of them do not show up. Their competitors do.
"Properties are not making that shortlist because they are not understanding where that information is being pulled from," she said. The machine is pulling from whatever content exists: FAQs, sales-focused website copy, staff profiles, solution-oriented case studies. Hotels that have invested in that content appear. Hotels that have a rates-and-dates webpage with a fifty-field RFP form do not.
Falter has been watching this play out from the direct booking side. He is seeing a measurable and growing stream of leads arriving at hotel websites with a note that simply says: "I found your hotel via ChatGPT. Looks like you'd be a great fit. Do you have availability in mid-August?"
No form. No intermediary. No commission. And the conversion rate on those leads? Thirty to fifty percent, compared to five to seven percent on a CVENT RFP.
"That should be exciting to a lot of hotels," Falter said. The commission-free, high-intent, AI-sourced direct lead is not a future scenario. It is arriving now, and the hotels benefiting from it are those that have already built content that tells the AI what problems they solve.
This is the shift Falter describes as moving from product-centric selling to problem-solving selling. Not "we have 25,000 square feet of flexible meeting space" but "here is how that space served as the backdrop for a sales kickoff that helped a company exceed its third-quarter targets." AI is crawling for E-E-A-T signals: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust. Transactional spec sheets do not feed that machine. Evidence-based outcomes do.
For years, hotel sales culture treated response time as a proxy for performance. How fast did you respond in CVENT? How many proposals went out this week? How many calls are on the board?
Berke has a two-word answer for what happens to that approach: sales activity will become irrelevant.
What replaces it is outcome-based accountability. Site tours booked. Meetings converted. Net new accounts opened. Revenue generated from proactive outreach, not reactive processing. "What did it drive?" is the question that matters. Most teams cannot answer it yet, because they have not had to.
Valdov is already recalibrating what she measures. "I wanna know how many true customer engagements have you made. How many people have you talked to?" That includes texts, emails, video messages, calls. The channel is less important than the quality of the conversation and whether it moved something forward.
The problem with speed as a metric is that it optimizes for volume. It rewards the seller who sends the most proposals, not the one who sends the right one to the right person at the right moment with the right context. When AI takes over the volume game, the sellers who built their identity around it will be left without a role. The sellers who were always trying to do something more thoughtful, and kept getting pulled back to the inbox, will finally have room to do the work they were actually good at.
"The best sellers will be the ones that feel stifled right now," Valdov said.
If you are a hotel seller walking into 2025 trying to figure out what to build, Valdov has a clear prescription: data confidence, customer understanding, and people skills.
Data confidence does not mean becoming an analyst. It means being comfortable enough with what the numbers are telling you to use them in a conversation. It means pulling intent data, reading a star report with context, understanding what a booking pattern signals about a prospect's future needs. "You've got to be able to read data like you read a room," she said.
Customer understanding means doing the research before the call—not asking a prospect what their company does, but knowing it. That means knowing who their competitors are, what their event history looks like, what cause they publicly support, and what outcomes their last meeting produced. AI can surface all of that in minutes. The seller's job is to synthesize it into a hypothesis that earns the right to a real conversation.
Berke calls this the detective skill. "If you're a sleuth online, you're gonna be amazing in sales." The days of opening with "Hi, I'm calling from Hotel XYZ, do you have any upcoming room needs?" are over. Not because it was ever a good opening, but because prospects now have a baseline expectation that if you reached out, you already know something about them. If you do not, you have already lost credibility before you said anything useful.
The third muscle, people skills, sounds obvious until you realize how much of current sales infrastructure is designed to minimize the need for them. Forms, email templates, automated follow-up sequences, digital proposals submitted into a void. All of it reduces human contact and calls it efficiency. The irony is that as AI takes over every part of that layer, the sellers left standing will be the ones who were always better at the conversation than the paperwork.
Berke adds a fourth quality she looks for in a seller: curiosity. Not general curiosity, but the specific, sustained kind that drives someone to understand a customer's world well enough to ask questions that land. "I know nothing about tax accounting software," she said, describing a recent sales call, "but within seven minutes I'm getting it." That fluency, built fast, is what earns credibility. Without it, you are a seller asking questions that your prospect could answer by looking at their own website.
There is a hotel seller somewhere right now who has spent two hours building a proposal, populated it with rates, room specs, and catering menus, uploaded it to a portal, and hit submit. The planner on the other end will receive it alongside forty-nine identical submissions from competing properties and run the whole stack through an AI comparison tool to find the best fit.
"Everyone is sending them back a digital proposal that they are uploading into some AI tool and saying, find me the best hotel," Valdov said. In that environment, the proposal is table stakes. It is not the differentiator. The differentiator is what happens before and after it.
Falter makes the case for video as the highest-leverage, lowest-cost trust tool available to hotel sellers. Not produced video. Not a polished brand asset. A thirty-second clip, shot on a smartphone, attached to a proposal or sent as a LinkedIn DM, putting a face to a name and a voice behind the pitch.
The data point that stops people: Berke asked planner Dana Nitti, directly, how many videos she had ever received from a hotel seller. Not from a brand. Not from a marketing department. From a salesperson on property, personally following up on a proposal.
None.
Not a low number. None.
"The bar is not just low," Falter said. "It's literally in the basement."
This is not a technology barrier. It is a psychological one. Sellers with 275,000 TikTok followers and who post daily on Instagram go silent the moment someone suggests they record a thirty-second video for a prospect. The fear of rejection, the concern about being too much, the worry about the imperfect lighting, all of it creates paralysis in the exact channel that would actually differentiate them.
Berke's advice: "Take thirty seconds of insane courage. Ship the email. Send the video. Put yourself out there."
Valdov has a seller on her team who closed a wedding by walking the bride through the property on a live video call. No formal tour. No polished presentation. Just a real person, showing a real space, having a real conversation. The bride booked. "They wanna see, they wanna hear, they wanna know that it's a real person," Valdov said.
That seller did not win because of speed. She won because of trust. And the two are not the same thing.
The hotel sales team of 2027 will not be the biggest. It will be the most connected, the most intelligent about its data, and the most human in how it shows up.
Berke sketches the org structure for a mid-size property: a coordinator keeping operations running, someone managing the AI RFP pipeline, one or two dedicated hunters in a pure business-development role, and a director serving more as a relationship manager and account owner. The hunters may not even be on property. They will not be pulled into lobby coverage or check-in support. Their job is to find and start conversations that become revenue.
For smaller or independent hotels, this may look different: a single person might fill multiple roles, and the same seller could be both responding to leads and proactively seeking new business. The key is to adapt the principle—focusing time and energy where it drives the highest value, relying on technology to support administrative work, and ensuring every customer interaction feels personal and proactive. No matter the team size, it's about making room for real conversations and relationship-building, rather than just keeping up with tasks.
"When we all have access to the same tools and the same information, we're all swimming in the same pond," Berke said. The differentiator is who gets out of the pond and into conversations that nobody else is having.
Falter adds the marketing dimension: the team page. Hotels spend significant money on photography of empty ballrooms and renovated lobbies. They do not show their people. A prospect asked to spend five figures on an event from a website filled with vacant spaces, and the contact form has given no reason to trust the organization behind the booking. Properties that have added a team page with genuine personality, headshots with some humanity behind them, brief profiles that tell you who you are going to work with, have seen it become one of the most-visited pages on the site.
"Every hotel has ballrooms and guest rooms and TVs and showers," Valdov said. "What they don't have is Nickole or Cory or Celeste."
Aimbridge is already building one-sheets for their sales teams, including headshots and personal details, and sending them directly to customers. The logic is simple: with more AI in the process, the human becomes the differentiator, not the venue.
Berke notes that independent hotels have a window right now. Branded properties are constrained by guidelines that limit how much personality can show up on a property website. Independents are not. They can humanize their digital presence today, before the brands catch up, and build the kind of trust signals that both AI search and real humans respond to. That window will close. It has not closed yet.
There is a through-line in everything Valdov, Berke, and Falter discussed, and it is worth naming directly.
AI will handle speed. It will handle volume. It will respond to RFPs faster than any human, hold rate better than most, qualify leads more consistently, and surface intent signals that would take a seller hours to find manually. It will do all of this without taking a lunch break, needing a pep talk, or worrying about rejection.
What it will not do is build trust.
Trust is built when a planner feels seen and when a seller references something real from their event history. When someone sends a video that took three minutes to make and proves there is a human being who actually read the brief. When the account manager picks up the phone three days after an event to ask how it went, not to upsell, just to close the loop. When the DOS whose team has been there for twenty-five years can say with genuine authority: This property will take care of you.
"People will always want to do business with people they trust," Valdov said. That has not changed. What has changed is that AI will handle everything except that, which means trust is no longer one factor among many. It is the only irreplaceable one.
The sellers who understand this are already in the best position they have ever been in. The sellers still optimizing for CVENT response time are on a clock they have not checked.
"Get out from behind the proposal," Valdov said.
The window to do something different is open. It will not stay open forever.
