Interview: Hard Rock Hotels' Greg Naylor

Hard Rock Hotels & Casinos consolidated its sales efforts by creating a director of sales position to handle group and corporate transient business across its portfolio. While licensing agreements do not obligate Hard Rock to provide central sales support, requests from both hotels and clients drove the company to underwrite the position, according to executive vice president Michael Shindler.

"We saw a lack of a single point of contact, which I think businesses, and particularly meeting planners, found very frustrating," Shindler said. "From a corporate support perspective for our different properties, this gives us one more degree of robustness that did not previously exist."

The new position also opens the door for hotel development opportunities, Shindler added, because the question of sales support often is part of planning discussions. "Up until about 90 days ago, we didn't have a good answer for that," he said.

Hard Rock hired hotel industry veteran Greg Naylor to assume the new role. Naylor's experience includes a two-year stint as director of group sales for Hard Rock Hotel Chicago and positions with Starwood Hotels & Resorts and Ritz-Carlton. He most recently served as corporate director of electronic distribution and sales systems for West Paces Hotel Group, an Atlanta-based company that operates a small portfolio of luxury hotels globally, including the Capella and Solis brands.

Naylor recently spoke recently with Business Travel News lodging editor Michael B. Baker about how his position will affect relationships with meeting buyers and help Hard Rock become a larger player in the corporate transient market.

What's the focus of this new role?

There's been a need to have someone out in the marketplace really from a group space standpoint, promoting the brand as a whole. We've got a number of great hotels out there working hard to fill their space, and it gets challenging. This role will be an opportunity to help them out in hunting for business and providing them with lead generation and business generation. We'll be able to serve clients and provide an easier way of doing business. Time is precious, and you have a number of clients out there who don't necessarily have the time to go property by property to make those relationships. Now, in this role, I'll be able to do that and cover the portfolio of hotels through one point of contact. Probably 60 percent of my time will be focused on direct sales efforts. The other 40 percent will be coordinating trade show efforts [and] market opportunities, getting the hotels to work together and identify great opportunities in each feeder market to do a client event or sales blitzes.

What sort of portfolio will you be selling?

We have 12 hotels currently, and there are a number of deals we're working on to build that. [One that will open at the end of the year in Panama City, Panama] is a large property—1,500 rooms, 40,000 square feet of function space—so it'll be a great opportunity to send business their way. In addition to lead generation, it's also looking for opportunities and synergies within the portfolio of hotels, to find ways to work together. We want to make clients brand-loyal instead of being property-loyal. We'll be working the trade shows to get out there as a unified front and have all the hotels under one umbrella versus historically working with CVBs or having the hotels out there on their own.

How is group business faring?

Business is definitely picking up. However, lead times are very short. Small meetings, you're talking in the month for the month, if not two weeks out for meetings smaller than 50. Your 100-person meetings, you're seeing within six months. The really larger programs that typically are greater than two years out are within two years. People have the tendency to plan certain events based on what's going on with the economy, so it's driving a lot of short-term stuff.

Does Hard Rock see much corporate transient business?

There is in Chicago; Vegas as well. From there, it tapers off. There is some corporate travel in San Diego in the Gaslamp area, but that's primarily a group location and leisure transient. The corporate transient world will evolve and grow as we add to our portfolio and add key gateway markets. The primary focus will certainly be on the group side, but as we add additional hotels, I would hope to focus more of my time in that area and work with the hotels in the RFP process.

Do you project an increase in corporate transient RFPs this year?

I would expect so. Certainly, speaking with our teams in San Diego and Chicago, they've seen an uptick in RFPs year over year, and they have strong expectations that will be strong again through this season as well.