As of today, March 24, 2009, there are 800+ hotel-related sales and marketing jobs in the US posted on Hcareers.com alone. That doesn't sound like a recession...unfortunately, that's not the case. While jobseekers perk up at the notion of an abundance of hotel sales & marketing positions, I cringe at the notion that conventional expectations and benchmarks for these roles may be impossible to realize.

Business and leisure travel is down in general, as well as convention attendance and off-site meeting planning. This will not change anytime soon. For many hotels and resorts, the rooms that guests would occupy if they were traveling for any of the aforementioned reasons constitute both the majority of a hotel's space and the primary source of its revenue. So - now what?

In my first article for HotelExecutive.com, "The New "H" Word and the Future of Hotels: (and stop ignoring the locals...)" I proposed that many hotels may benefit from a shift in branding and marketing toward a "habitat" model - providing an ongoing "hub" of activity and experiences for locals as well as out of town guests. In my second article, I discussed means of cross-marketing these activities once they were created. In this article ...