Report Overview
Empowered by the explosion of data companies own or have access to about their existing customers as well as prospective customers, travel CMOs and their teams are on a mission to drive and transform business. Yet, more opportunities and promises mean more complexities in technological offerings and skill and function demands. It is within this context that marketing operations has risen as an important discipline in the past few years.
As a result, marketing operations is often tasked to manage channel and campaign processes and performance evaluation, select and manage technology partners, plan budget, and coordinate inter- and cross-team communications. Yet, core questions remain: Should there be a separate marketing operations specialist/team? What are the responsibilities and decision-making powers of the marketing operations function? In addition, there are broader questions that are related to operations and crucial to marketing success, including how marketing teams should be structured, what functions should report under marketing, and how budgets should be set.
To help travel marketing executives see how they stack up in the industry in these areas and set up strategies to optimize, Skift Research conducted a survey of senior executives and marketing professionals in various travel sectors on their practices and attitudes related to these questions. We will release the survey findings in a series of reports, each focusing on one specific sector. This report presents data for hotels.
For the purpose of this report, we included respondents who selected “hotels and hotel groups” as their primary industry. Total sample size is 118. Please see the Appendix for more detailed sample demographics.
What You'll Learn From This Report
- 2019 marketing priorities for hotels and hotel groups
- Prevalence of dedicated marketing operations functions in hotel companies
- Responsibilities and effectiveness of marketing operations functions in hotels
- How hotel marketing teams are structured and the effectiveness of each structure
- Ideal marketing team structures in delivering marketing success
- Functions that report under marketing in hotels
- How hotel companies set up marketing budgets and the effectiveness of each budgeting approach
- How hotels that are more profitable than peers stand out in key marketing operations areas