AI for Hotel Sales That Feels Like a Teammate, Not a Tool

Most group RFPs aren’t lost on pricing.

They’re lost on speed.

72% of the time, the first hotel to reply wins the deal.

But what if you’re too slow because you’re buried in admin work, not because you’re bad at your job?

This is the part of the revenue story that rarely gets talked about. That even great teams, with good intentions and hard working people, are losing business for reasons that have nothing to do with effort or expertise.

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The Silent Crisis in Hotel Sales

Behind the grand lobbies and polished pitches, hotel sales teams are drowning in invisible work. Proposal emails, missing RFP details, call logs, data entry. These are friction points eating away at the very thing salespeople are meant to do: sell.

70% of hotel sales team time goes to non-revenue generating admin work. And as a result, 55% of group RFPs go unanswered. 

This is the peak of inefficiency & a revenue black hole. One that’s felt across the industry, especially as 65% of hotels report being understaffed.

Modern hotel sales teams are judged on revenue outcomes, but equipped with tools that were designed to store information, not to move work forward. CRMs record activity. Portals collect requests. Email moves messages around. None of them actually take work off the salesperson’s plate.

So teams compensate the only way they can. By working longer hours. By multitasking. By triaging. By letting some requests wait or go unresponded. 

We have spent years listening to hotel sales teams describe this moment. The moment where they know a deal matters, but the system around them makes it hard to act fast.This is the problem space we have been seeing, again and again, across properties, portfolios, and markets.

And that is where this product begins.

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The Why Now: When Speed Became Survival

The world didn’t always work like this.

But post-pandemic, planners expect faster answers. Guests expect digital convenience. And hotels, operating with leaner teams than ever, are being asked to do more with less.

What used to be a 4-day proposal window is now a same-day race.

Whereas, on the other hand, AI has now matured to a point where multiple specialized agents can work together to execute complex, multi-step workflows. Each agent takes on a distinct responsibility—whether it’s capturing leads, completing missing details, generating proposals, or tracking engagement—collaborating seamlessly to complete the full sales task from inquiry to close.

The collision of these forces creates an opening for something genuinely new. Not incremental improvement. A fundamental reimagining of what revenue software should do.

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What We Believe

We believe hotel sales teams shouldn’t lose deals because of slow software or scattered systems.

We believe RFPs should be responded to in minutes, not days.

We believe every inquiry deserves a response — not just the big ones.

We believe automation should feel like having a mate working alongside you—always on, proactively handling what needs to be done without waiting to be told, and not another tool that creates more work to manage.

We built HippoRev because the current tools weren’t built for this moment. They were built for a slower world. One where a four-day turnaround was fine. One where you had three people per RFP. One where follow-ups happened because someone remembered.

That world is gone.

Introducing HippoRev: The AI Sales Agent for Hotels

HippoRev isn’t a tool. It’s a teammate.

Our belief is simple and demanding.

Software should execute work, not just inform it.

If a task is repetitive, rules based, and directly tied to revenue, it should not live in a human inbox. It should live with an AI agent whose job is to do it, reliably, every time.

This is why we do not think of this product as automation in the traditional sense. Automation follows scripts. Agents take responsibility. And when multiple AI agents work together, each handling their part of the workflow, they complete the entire process end to end—from inquiry to the signed contract.

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With HippoRev:

• One agent captures every inquiry the moment it arrives—no manual entry, no missed opportunities.
• Another spots missing details and reaches out proactively, so nothing stalls.
• A third assembles a complete, tailored proposal—ready for you to review and personalize in minutes.
• And yet another tracks planner engagement, signaling precisely when it’s time to jump in and close.

Together, they form an always-on sales team—working behind the scenes so your team can focus on what matters most.

In this model, multiple AI agents handle the repetitive, time-consuming tasks—each one built for a specific job, working in sync to keep the process moving. What stays human is what matters most: the judgment, the relationships, the final call. What disappears is the drudgery that never should have been human work to begin with.

The future of hotel group sales isn’t about working harder.

It’s about removing the friction that’s slowing your best people down.

With HippoRev, speed becomes your strategy. And every inquiry becomes an opportunity.

We’ve built this for the realities of modern hotel group sales.
We’ve built this for teams who care about winning the right way.
By being present. By being fast. By being more human.

Ready to see what inquiry-to-close intelligence looks like in practice?

Book a demo and experience the future of hotel group sales.That's the world we're building. And we're just getting started.

We Didn’t Set Out to Build Another Product. We Set Out to Fix a Feeling.

There’s a moment that keeps replaying in my head.

It’s early evening. The office is quieting down. A sales manager is finally packing up for the day when an RFP lands in the inbox. A good one. High value. Tight timeline.

They know the math.

Respond late, and the deal is probably gone. Respond now, and the evening disappears.

That tradeoff felt wrong. And the longer we spent around hotel sales teams, the more we realized it wasn’t an isolated moment. It was the job.

This is the story of how HippoRev came to be. Not as a product roadmap. But as a response to something that felt fundamentally broken.

The Pattern We Couldn’t Ignore

For years, we worked closely with sales teams across industries. We watched what helped them connect better. We built tools that made communication clearer, more personal, more human.

And yet, in conversation after conversation, the same frustration kept surfacing.

“I love selling. I hate everything around it.”

Hotel group sales teams were not short on effort, skill, or intent. They were drowning in process.

Inquiries arriving from everywhere. Details missing. Endless back and forth. Proposals that took hours to assemble. Follow ups that depended on memory, not signals.

The most striking part was this. None of it felt like real sales work.

It felt like people compensating for systems that were never designed for how hospitality actually works.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, a set of questions started to surface.

Why does every RFP, no matter how similar, have to be rebuilt from scratch?

Why does a sales manager need to manually call or email planners just to collect information that should have been obvious, structured, or already known?

Why does so much of a salesperson’s time go into chasing missing details instead of advancing real conversations?

None of these questions were about real effort or commitment. 

The Wrong Fixes

At first, we tried to solve pieces of the problem.

Better visibility here. Faster creation there. Smarter reminders. More dashboards.

But every improvement felt like adding a layer on top of a shaky foundation.

Teams were already overloaded. Giving them another tool just gave them another place to check.

We realized something uncomfortable. We were optimizing the wrong thing.

The real issue was not insight. It was execution.

Hotels did not need to know what to do next. They needed the work to actually get done.

Asking the Hard Question

Late in the process, we asked ourselves a question that changed everything.

What if software did not just assist sales teams, but actually took responsibility for the work that slows them down?

Not suggesting. Not nudging. Not reminding.

Executing.

Capturing every inquiry. Qualifying intent early. Completing missing details. Building proposals. Tracking engagement. Triggering follow ups at the right moment.

And crucially, doing it in a way that still kept humans in control.

That question became the spine of HippoRev.

Why Hotels, Specifically

We chose to start with hotel group sales for a simple reason. The pain was visible, measurable, and urgent.

Group business is complex by nature. Multiple stakeholders. Detailed requirements. Tight timelines. High expectations.

And yet, most systems treated it like generic B2B sales.

They tried to solve individual problems—room blocks, event space constraints, planner preferences—in isolation. But group sales isn’t a series of disconnected tasks. It’s a tightly woven workflow where delay at any step breaks the whole. 

Speed mattered more than most teams realized. Not speed for its own sake, but speed as a proxy for care, competence, and confidence.

When planners wait days for a response, they do not assume the hotel is busy. They assume it is disorganized.

Building Agents, Not Tools

Once we committed to the idea of execution-first software, everything changed.

We stopped asking what features to add.

We started asking what work should never require a human in the first place.

That led us to agents. Not chatbots. Not workflows. Purpose-built agents designed to own specific parts of the revenue process.

An agent that never misses an inquiry, no matter where it comes from.

An agent that sees what information is missing and goes and gets it.

An agent that understands pricing context and surfaces real options, not guesses.

An agent that watches how planners engage and knows when it is time to act.

Individually, each solves a familiar problem. Together, they remove entire categories of work from a salesperson’s day.

The Moments That Told Us We Were Close

There were many false starts along the way.

Agents that worked in isolation but failed together. Automations that were fast but brittle. Early demos that maybe impressed technically but didn’t change how teams felt emotionally.

The breakthrough moments were not technical. They were human.

A sales manager telling us they stopped checking six systems every morning.

A director realizing no RFP had slipped through in weeks.

Someone saying they reviewed a proposal after dinner instead of building it during dinner.

Those were the signals we cared about.

What Launching Actually Means to Us

Launching HippoRev is not about declaring victory. It is about opening the door.

It’s about moving from what needs to get done—capturing inquiries, qualifying leads, chasing details, building proposals, tracking engagement, triggering follow-ups—to when those things actually get done, automatically, instantly, and without slipping through the cracks.

We know this is a beginning. There is more to refine, more to learn, more to build.

But we believe deeply in the direction.

Software should remove drudgery, not add to it.

AI should execute work, not create more decisions.

Sales teams should spend their time building relationships, not fighting systems.

What Comes Next

We are starting with hotel group sales because the need is clear and the impact is immediate.

But the idea behind HippoRev goes beyond hospitality.

Everywhere we look, talented people are trapped doing work that software should have handled years ago.

Our goal is to change that, one workflow at a time, without losing the human side of selling.

If you are a hotel sales leader reading this, thank you for trusting us early. Your feedback shaped this more than you know.

If you are just discovering HippoRev, welcome. We are building this in the open, and we plan to keep listening.

This is not about replacing people.

It is about giving them their craft back.

And this is only the first step.

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You can book time with us here:

👉 Book a one-on-one walkthrough.

How HippoRev Works: A Complete Technical Deep Dive

You've heard what HippoRev does: capture inquiries, qualify leads, generate proposals, track engagement, automate follow-ups.

But how does it actually work?

How does an AI agent parse a 47-page corporate RFP? How does it know what's missing? How does it generate a proposal with accurate pricing from your PMS? How does it decide when to send a follow-up?

This is the technical deep dive. By the end, you'll understand exactly how HippoRev executes your hotel sales workflow—from architectural decisions to AI models to integration mechanics.

Let's start at the beginning.

Architecture Overview: The Four-Agent System

HippoRev is built on a multi-agent architecture where four specialized AI agents work together to handle different phases of the hotel sales workflow.

Each agent has its own dedicated intelligence, trained specifically for hospitality. They understand industry language, MICE and SMERF terminology, room blocks, event space constraints, pricing structures, and planner behavior. They also operate with historical context, learning from past inquiries, proposals, outcomes, and engagement patterns to make better decisions over time.

Think of it like a sales team, but automated:

• Lead Catcher Agent = Your SDR who captures and qualifies inquiries, auto-collects all the missing details
• RFP Response Agent = Your proposal specialist who builds complete responses
• Engagement Agent = Your sales operations analyst who tracks and optimizes
• Sales & Marketing Agent = Your outbound BDR who fills the pipeline

But unlike a human team, these agents:

• Work 24/7 without breaks
• Never forget a follow-up
• Maintain perfect context across all interactions
• Execute at consistent quality every time
• Share memory and context seamlessly

The key architectural principle: Each agent is autonomous in its domain, but they all operate on a shared context layer that maintains complete deal history, planner preferences, property capabilities, and engagement signals.

HippoRev is more than a sales enablement tool.
It’s a full AI sales agent that handles your workflow—from inquiry to close.

In this post, we’ll break down exactly how it works across four automated stages:

CAPTURE → COMPLETE → CREATE → CLOSE

🔶 Step 1: Capture Every RFP (from Everywhere)

RFPs and group inquiries don’t arrive politely in one place. They hit Cvent, email, website forms, phone calls, partner portals, even voicemail.

Lead Catcher Agent unifies everything instantly:

• Pulls new leads from all channels into one clean dashboard
• Parses key details (event type, dates, rooms, F&B signals)
• Qualifies and scores automatically (e.g., “Corporate retreat – 180 pax – $92K potential – 94% fit”)
• Front Desk Agent answers property calls 24/7, asks qualifying questions naturally, and logs the lead

Result: 100% capture rate. Nothing slips through. Hot opportunities rise to the top so your team sees them first.

“We went from missing 36% of RFPs… to capturing 100%.”
— Director of Sales

🔶 Step 2: Complete Missing Details Automatically

Most RFPs arrive missing critical information: attendee counts, room block needs, special requirements, budget signals.

Chasing answers used to take days of email tag.

Now:

• RFP Response Agent scans the RFP and flags what’s missing
• It reaches out directly — usually via phone (natural, professional AI voice) — to the planner
• Example call snippet: “Hi Sarah, this is from Grand Hotel following up on your March corporate retreat RFP. I just need to confirm the expected attendee count and any A/V requirements so we can prepare the most accurate proposal.”
• Answers auto-fill the fields → status changes to “Proposal-ready”

No more waiting. You start with complete information.

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Imagine a scenario where a planner submits an RFP through your website, and within 60 seconds, they get a courteous call confirming a few missing details. No forms. No follow-ups. Just instant professionalism.

Over time, that experience sticks. Planners learn which hotels respond fast, ask the right questions, and respect their time. Those are the properties they look for first when the next RFP goes out.

🔶 Step 3: Create Full Proposals in Minutes

Proposals shouldn’t take all day.
And they shouldn’t start from a blank page every time.

HippoRev uses your branding, pricing data, room inventory, AV specs, and your past RFP history to build a complete proposal for every inquiry in minutes.

Once an RFP is ready, the system does more than just assemble information.

The agent pulls real-time rates from your PMS (Opera, Fidelio, etc.), references your comp set, historical pricing, and current demand signals. At the same time, it looks backward.

It analyzes your previous proposals, past wins and losses, and the templates and structures that have performed best for similar events. What worked for corporate offsites. What converted for association conferences. What stalled deals in the past and should be avoided.

That context shapes what gets created.

The result is a full proposal that includes:

• Accurate pricing packages grounded in real demand and past outcomes
• Branded virtual tours embedded directly in the proposal
• A personalized 20–40 second video walkthrough, tailored to the event type
• An interactive Active Deal Room link, not a static PDF

Review takes 5–10 minutes. You approve or tweak, then send.

Average time from RFP received to proposal sent: under 20 minutes.

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“We now send 5 proposals before lunch. They’re better, too.”
— Senior Sales Manager

🔶 Step 4: Close with Intelligence

After sending, most teams go dark. HippoRev stays awake:

Engagement Agent tracks every action in the Active Deal Room:

• Who opened it and when
• Time spent on pricing, virtual tour, F&B menus
• Which videos were watched (and rewatched)
• Whether it was forwarded to stakeholders

Real-time alerts fire to your phone or Slack:

“Sarah Chen viewed pricing 3× and spent 4:12 on room rates. The lead is hot — call now.”

Internal collaboration happens inside the Deal Room (notes, revenue manager pricing flex, ops feasibility comments) — invisible to the planner.

When ready, the planner signs the contract directly in the Deal Room. Auto-hand-off notifies operations and creates the event brief.

The Outcome

• Response time: 12× faster
• Win rate: 25% higher
• Admin work: 90% reduced
• Planners: 3× more engaged with video + interactive Deal Rooms
• You: Back to evenings, weekends, and actual relationship-building

✅ Integrated, Automated, Instant

What happens when every part of the workflow is connected is simple.

Each AI Agent shares context behind the scenes, so every interaction feels smooth, informed, and human. Information does not get re-entered. Nothing waits for handoffs. No signal is lost between steps.

When an inquiry arrives, it moves to ONE place.
When details are missing, they are gathered.
When a proposal is ready, it is created.
When a planner engages, the right action follows.

You don’t lift a finger.
HippoRev does the work.
You close the deal in no time at all.

💼 Ready to Try It?

If you’re ready to:

• Cut proposal time by 90%
• Stop missing leads
• And finally automate your group sales workflow...

→ [Book your free 30-day pilot here]

No credit card. No friction.
Just faster deals, better days, and zero RFP chaos.

Have Questions? Reach out directly.

Happy to walk you through any part of the flow.

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