Jordi Sastre from RD Optimize, hotel marketing expert: “The foundation for a robust distribution industry is direct selling”

The founder of RD Optimise, Jordi Sastre, has a wealth of experience in hotel distribution, direct sales development, revenue management, and digital marketing from his time working as Head of Direct Sales, eCommerce, and Marketing at organisations like Barceló Hotels & Resorts, PortBlue Hotels, Logitravel, and Baleària.

He began working on this project with his partner, Xim Busquets, who has previously managed numerous exceptional boutique hotels on the island and has a wealth of commercial and operational expertise in the hotel industry.

Where did the concept for RD Optimise originate?

We grew more conscious of the necessity for particular specialised profiles within the hotel sector as we advanced in our individual positions and careers, such as revenue management, digital marketing, direct sales, and technology.

Small and medium-sized hotel firms find it very difficult to hire skilled staff with these kinds of talents since the pay are often exorbitant and the skills are not acquired during a single contract because too much is sacrificed.

Many times, having this “full time” workforce was inefficient, but we could benefit a hotel chain with all this expertise and at a far lesser cost than what three or four of these profiles would cost.

To put it simply, we succeeded in raising hotels to a very competitive level and encouraging them to aim much higher goals, which allowed the hotelier to benefit from our service.

What are the advantages that hotels stand to gain from hiring you, and what makes you unique?

Put simply, we take over the role of these hotels’ business division. First of all, we are a completely integrated team member who does not interfere with the structures or policies of any of our clients. This prompts us to collaborate on the hotel’s primary business plans in an effort to improve management effectiveness.

In addition to handling the strategy formulation of the hotel’s revenue management, we also handle the integrated management of the responsibilities in this domain. We are responsible for managing pricing and all that this entails in terms of operations.

Direct sales are our main priority. We stand out from the competition because of our deep specialism in this field, which we believe is the key to a healthy distribution that will increase profit for the hotels.

However, our flexible economic approach allows us to tailor it to the specific requirements of each hotel, ensuring that it never acts as a barrier to admission. Prioritising the validation of the model with hotels is our first priority; the economic analysis will always follow. The fact that a customer has backed out has not yet presented an issue.

Our goal in providing accompaniment is to raise average prices in order to optimise the hotel’s commercial earnings. We may accomplish these goals by implementing more complex revenue actions and fusing them with a potent direct sales development. This will raise our Net ADR while also enabling us to progressively enhance distribution.

In light of this, how do you really assist your clients?

Our business takes a 360-degree approach to internet marketing. Controlling distribution is the goal; to do this, one must comprehend each of the sales channels involved, what they provide in their net vision, and be able to add or remove distributors as needed.

Once we’ve determined the best combination of channels, we manage pricing and business rules for the hotel on a daily basis, creating and implementing them across all portals and keeping an eye on how they affect the key performance metrics. We believe that having measuring tools—mostly via BI—is crucial to our ability to assess the sales environment and reach prompt, well-informed conclusions.

We previously made it clear that direct sales are a top priority for us. We are aware that if we can leverage the various levers to grow this channel (web + call centre), we will inevitably become more efficient in distribution. This is because, on the one hand, distribution costs will go down, and on the other hand, we should be able to attain a higher Net ADR than with other sales channels.

Lastly, how do you see hotel distribution developing?

When it comes to average prices and occupancy, we are coming from very good times (apart from the pandemic moment), particularly in places like Majorca, where we can also include Palma, which has had a huge boom recently in terms of new hotel construction as well as occupancy and prices.

It is unavoidable to believe that this growing scenario will eventually come to an end and that the market will no longer be able to support such high costs, therefore hotels should make every effort to be ready for this eventuality now.

Everything points to the future distribution and marketing strategies that will continue to be effective: creating their own channels, prioritising loyalty programmes, managing distribution, avoiding reliance on channels that might not provide much flexibility in the future, implementing increasingly advanced revenue strategies, and digitising hotel operations and commercial procedures.