Dana Nitti has a nickname for ChatGPT. She calls it Janet.
Dana is the co-owner of SD Event Productions in San Diego, where the SD stands for Shannon and Dana, not the city. She plans everything from corporate meetings to Comic-Con activations, and she is exactly the kind of planner hotel sellers spend their careers trying to reach.
She recently joined Cory Falter and Celeste Berke Knisely on a LinkedIn LIVE for Sales on Tap to talk about what planners actually want from hotel sales teams. What came out of that conversation should make every seller sit up straight.
Because Janet is already making decisions about your property.
And you are not even in the room.
Before Dana sends a single RFP, before she picks up the phone, before she has any contact with a sales team … she is already researching.
She’s looking for:
Capacity charts. Photos. Distance from the airport. Walkability. The feel of the neighborhood. Whether the property matches the mission, the objectives, and the agenda of the event she is building.
"For me, it's more about the experience I'm trying to create," Dana says. "Is that venue going to meet the mission, the objectives, and the agenda of the meeting or event?"
She is not browsing a GDS.
She is prompting an AI engine she has personalized enough to give a name.
And Janet is pulling from whatever your property has made available online, cross-referencing it with reviews, comparing it against competitors, and serving Dana a shortlist before your sales team has touched a single lead.
If your property is not showing up in those results, Dana, a seasoned planner with deep local knowledge, will manually add you. She knows the San Diego market well enough to prompt Janet specifically: "Can you also give me information on this hotel?"
Most planners are not Dana.
Celeste says, "A novice planner, someone who's an executive assistant or on the marketing team who has now been sent to go find us venues, would completely skip over viable options because AI did not produce that in a search."
That executive assistant is not going to prompt Janet six different ways to surface your boutique conference property.
They are going to take the first page of results, build a shortlist from it, and move on.
If you are not there, you do not exist. The RFP never comes. You never even knew you were being considered.
Ouch.
This is not a marketing problem in the traditional sense. It is a visibility problem with a very specific cause: hotel sellers are not contributing enough content, enough answers to frequently asked questions, enough credible professional presence to feed the engines that now do the first round of sourcing.
Marketing owns the schema and the technical infrastructure. But sellers have their own role to play, and most of them do not yet know it.
Let's say your property does show up. Dana submits an RFP. A seller reaches out. What happens next?
She looks them up.
"Is there anyone in my connections who knows this person? And then, I want to see that they're professional."
Professional, in this context, is specific.
These are not unfair questions. They are the same questions a seller would ask about a planner before a site visit.
And here is the part that should sting: a weak LinkedIn profile probably will not kill the deal if the property is strong. Dana is clear on that. But it will make her cautious. It might make her ask to speak with someone else. It will absolutely color her first impression of what working with that team will feel like.
Now flip it. What if the seller's profile showed genuine expertise? Posts about the neighborhood around the property. Insights about what makes a great meeting experience in that market. Evidence that this person understands the planner's world, not just the hotel's inventory.
"You can tell that they're collaborative," Dana says. "That definitely is a plus."
Credibility is cumulative.
Every post a seller does not write, every question they do not answer publicly, every week they go dark on LinkedIn is a small withdrawal from an account that planners are quietly checking before they ever say hello.
Dana receives a lot of generic emails. She is not impressed by it.
"When you get that generic email back, you just feel like they're just checking the boxes. It only takes a few extra minutes to actually personalize your messages."
The specific frustration she names is proposals that include things she never asked for.
Templates fired off without a real conversation. Information that has nothing to do with the event she described. The implicit message those proposals convey is: "I processed your request." I did not read it.
The counter-example she describes is not complicated.
A seller who acknowledges the submission. Who asks a clarifying question. Who suggests a phone call not to close the deal, but to make sure they are hitting all the marks. Who passes an inquiry to the right territory contact and actually tells the planner they did it, rather than letting it disappear into someone else's inbox.
"I've had situations where I've sent it to someone and don't hear back from them, and I'll follow up a few days later. 'Oh, it's not my territory, but so-and-so will follow up with you.' Being that proactive, it might not be your job, but at least you are connecting the pieces."
That bar, connecting the pieces when it is technically not your problem, is apparently enough to stand out.
Which tells you everything about how low the baseline is.
Here’s another sticky situation: planners sometimes submit RFPs with almost no information, treat phone calls as an imposition, and then complain that proposals aren't customized enough.
Dana acknowledges this. She also takes responsibility for her part: "The more information I can give you, the better proposal I'm gonna get."
Not every planner thinks this way. But the sellers who build the best relationships are the ones who create enough trust early enough that planners actually want to share more.
Cory asked Dana how many times a hotel seller had sent her a personalized video message. A voice note. Anything that showed a real human being was on the other end of the inquiry.
Her answer: never. Not once that she could remember.
Not a single hotel seller, in her entire career, had done something that takes less than two minutes and costs nothing.
Celeste framed the opportunity this way: "How about sending a proposal and then having a video attached to it? This is our team, this is what we're going to do."
There's your vibe. There's your personality. There’s your differentiator.
This matters because of what AI cannot do.
Sure, Dana uses Janet for data. Capacity charts, square footage, proximity to the airport, competitive comparisons. Janet is good at all of that.
But Janet cannot tell her whether the team at a property actually cares, whether the service will match the star rating, or whether the sales manager she is about to spend six months coordinating with is someone she will enjoy working with.
"Am I going to be treated with five-star service at a three-star hotel? Or am I going to be treated like one-star service at a four-star hotel? You don't get the personality of the hotel."
That personality has to come from somewhere.
Right now, it mostly does not come at all. It is the last differentiator that AI cannot replicate, and the industry is leaving it completely untouched.
The RFP used to be the starting line.
Sellers waited for it, responded to it, chased it.
That model is not dead, but it has been quietly moved further down the process than most sellers realize.
Dana now sends RFPs to roughly half the properties she might have contacted two years ago.
The pre-research she does with Janet has already made the call on the others. "It cuts down on everyone's time," she says.
For sellers, that means the real competition is not happening in the proposal. It is happening in the sources Janet is pulling from, in the LinkedIn profile she checked after you emailed her, in the reviews her colleagues shared when she asked who had stayed there.
For properties outside Dana's home market, she widens the net a little. But she is still starting online. She is still running it through Janet first. And for the planners who are not Dana, who do not have fifteen years of market knowledge to fill in the gaps, the AI results are not a starting point. They are the answer.
The good news is that the bar is genuinely low. Most hotel sellers are not personalizing outreach. Most are not creating content that feeds AI visibility. Most have never sent a video to a planner. Dana has never received one.
That means the seller who does these things is not competing against a crowded field. They are competing against almost nobody.
As Cory put it at the end of the conversation: "The bar is so low. It's in the basement."
The sellers who figure that out first will not just win more RFPs. They will get on the shortlist before the RFP exists.
Conversations like the one with Dana do not happen by accident. Sales on Tap is a community built specifically for hospitality sellers who are tired of operating on outdated playbooks and are ready to think differently about how they find, attract, and win the right business.
Sales on Tap brings in the people who actually make buying decisions, planners, executives, and decision-makers, and asks them the questions sellers are usually too polite to ask directly. The result is the kind of intel that does not show up in a training manual.
Because knowing that Dana has never once received a personalized video from a hotel seller is worth more than a dozen generic sales decks.
If you want more conversations like this one, practical, honest, and occasionally a little uncomfortable, join the Sales on Tap community for weekly sales tips and strategies from the people who live this work every day.
The bar is in the basement. Come help us raise it.
