Hilton has spent several years reorganizing its global sales operation for business travel in response to how corporations now shop for and buy hotels.
“B2B buyers have dramatically changed post-Covid,” said Frank Passanante, Hilton’s senior vice president and global head of sales, in a Skift interview at the Global Business Travel Association conference in Chicago this week.
The old model was often a person-to-person transaction. Hilton shifted to thinking in terms of “three prongs,” or groups, for different needs.
Some are largely unmanaged accounts served through digital self-serve portals for both shopping and booking. Some are customers who buy digitally but want someone on the call when they get stuck. And there are still the large accounts, where direct sellers act as personal advisors on complex negotiations.
Sellers are now aligned with “different sales rhythms, different things they do with customers, different ways of going to