By Vincenzo Proto, founder of Low Season Growth - 9.25.2026
Picture an independent hotel that already knows which dates are soft. The revenue system has flagged them. Marketing can launch something within hours. The booking engine is working and the CRM is collecting names. Two weeks later, the same Tuesday and Wednesday are still half the problem. The hotel had the information. It just never turned into a clear sequence of actions.
That is the gap I keep coming back to. It is not really a missing technology. It is the space between knowing that demand is weak and deciding who to target, what to offer, who will contact them and what happens after the first response. In many independent hotels, that space is still informal.
Revenue sees the gap first
Revenue management usually spots the problem before anyone else. Pickup slows. The booking window changes. One room type stops moving. Midweek occupancy falls behind the same period last year. That early warning is valuable because it gives the hotel time to act rather than react.
The response, though, often stays inside the pricing box: adjust rate, change restrictions, move inventory, improve channel positioning. Those decisions matter. But when the underlying problem is weak demand, a better price can improve conversion without bringing enough new people into the funnel.
At that point I would ask a different question: who could realistically travel on those dates, and what would make the trip worth considering now? Revenue management does not need to own that answer, but somebody does.
Marketing can amplify the wrong brief
Marketing is often asked to “do something” when a date looks weak. That can mean a paid campaign, an email, a social post or fresh destination content. All of it can help, especially when the hotel already knows who it wants to reach.
The problem starts when the marketing brief is broader than the commercial problem. The hotel may need to fill 18 rooms across three midweek dates, while the campaign is optimized for reach, traffic or engagement across the whole month. The numbers can look healthy without telling anyone whether those 18 rooms are getting easier to sell.
A better brief is almost boring in its specificity: these are the dates, this is the room-night gap, these are the two or three groups with a plausible reason to travel, and this is the action we want from them. Once that is clear, technology becomes useful in a much more practical way.
What is missing is not another department
For most independent hotels, the answer is not to create a new commercial team. It can be a small routine shared by revenue, marketing and whoever handles sales or guest relationships.
Start with the dates that actually need help. Pick a small number of segments that could produce demand. Give each segment a credible reason to travel. Build a short prospect list and use both direct marketing and proactive outreach. Then review what happened after a fixed period. None of that is complicated; the difficult part is doing it consistently.
The handoff matters more than the framework. Someone has to move the problem from the revenue report into action and keep it moving. Otherwise every function can do its own job well while the weak dates remain exactly where they were.
CRM first. Automation second.
This is where CRM becomes useful in a very unglamorous way. It remembers the context that teams forget: who was contacted, what they asked for, which dates mattered, whether a proposal went out, when the next follow-up is due and what happened after the conversation.
For a small hotel, I would take 30 relevant opportunities with clean notes over a database of thousands of names. The useful rules are simple: every live opportunity has an owner, every conversation has a next step, and every closed opportunity has a reason attached to it.
Only then does automation start to earn its place. It can handle reminders, lead enrichment, segmentation, follow-up sequences, call notes and reporting. If the underlying process is messy, automation simply creates more mess at speed. If the process is clear, it gives a small team real leverage.
Use technology for the boring parts
Technology is very good at the work people tend to postpone. It can flag unusual pickup, surface past guests with relevant stay patterns, group accounts by geography or business type and remind the team which leads have gone quiet.
It is much less useful at deciding why a particular company might need 12 rooms on a Wednesday, whether a local event is genuinely worth pursuing or whether an offer will sound convincing to a real buyer. That still takes local knowledge, curiosity and a conversation.
That is where I see the best balance. Let the system carry the repetitive workload. Keep people focused on judgement: who is worth contacting, why now, and what should we say?
Do not wait for the final booking to learn
Room nights and revenue are the final test. But if those are the only measures, the hotel may wait weeks to learn that the approach was wrong.
During a 30-day push, I would also watch qualified replies, proposal requests, direct enquiries, reactivated past guests and conversations with target accounts. If traffic rises and enquiries do not, the offer may be the problem. If enquiries arrive but proposals stall, the issue may be price, terms or response time. Those signals are useful because they tell the team what to fix next.
The industry does not need a new dashboard for every soft date. In many cases the hotel already has enough data. What is missing is a reliable bridge from “we know these dates are weak” to “here is what we are doing about them this week.” Revenue can show where to look. Marketing can create attention. Technology can remove repetitive work. The commercial layer is simply the part that connects those pieces and makes sure someone follows through.
Vincenzo Proto is the founder of Low Season Growth, which helps independent hotels, B&Bs and guesthouses turn a specific quiet period into a clearer commercial offer: who to reach, what to propose and h. His background spans business economics, B2B sales and hospitality operations, including experience in hotel administration at Club Med in St Moritz, with a focus on commercial execution for periods of weaker demand.
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