Expert: Steve Young - 6/13/2008

Question
I've been in retail sales for 1 1/2 years and heard hotel sales pays better and is a lot more interesting.  Can you tell me about hotel sales and how to make a possible career shift/change of direction.


Answer
Having a retail sales background will help land a job in hotel sales.  Be sure and include in your resume the skills you learned from retail sales such as *meeting customers needs *upselling *perhaps you helped increase your departments year over year sales.  These are all valuable skills than can be utilized in hotel sales.

Hotel sales is basically selling a hotels guestrooms, facilities and services to maximize revenue for a hotel.  It's kind of a fun sale because people like to hear about a hotel or resorts features.

To make a transition, you will need to learn more about hospitality sales.  I can't give you all of this information, you will have to do some work.  

Search google for a hotel sales career, take a course at a junior college, aprinda.com has an information section that gives an audio clip of what hotel sales people do on a daily basis.  Ecornell is a well known source of information for hospitality courses.  

Finally, you could start in another department and try and transfer over to sales in a year or so.  The front desk is probably the best place to start because it is the core of the hotel and you will interact with every department from that positon.