As we turn the page to 2025, the travel and hospitality industry is entering a new chapter. After a year of growth in 2024, the sector is now finding its footing in a more stable and predictable environment. While this is a welcome change, it also brings heightened competition. To stand out in this evolving landscape, it’s critical for businesses to adopt forward-thinking strategies that drive growth and efficiency.
Here are three key focus areas to help your business thrive in 2025.
- Leverage Emerging Technologies for Better Business Intelligence
The transformative potential of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), advanced data analytics and automation is refining how the travel and hospitality industry operates. These tools enable businesses to harness the power of business intelligence to understand performance benchmarks and make smarter decisions that drive growth and efficiency.
Steps to Take:
- Embrace Emerging Technologies: Identify repetitive or time-consuming tasks that can be automated. Streamlining these processes not only boosts efficiency but also empowers your team to focus on delivering exceptional service and driving revenue.
- Evaluate the Value of Your Data: High-quality, well-organized data is the cornerstone of successful AI and automation initiatives. Take this opportunity to assess data management strategies to ensure they support meaningful insights and actionable strategies.
- Leverage Benchmarking Capabilities: Utilize benchmarking tools to compare your performance against industry peers and standards. This helps identify gaps, refine goals and track progress.
- Start Your AI Journey Today: Explore forming a team or identifying simple opportunities to integrate AI into a process, communication need or workflow. Even small steps matter. Starting small can lead to significant impact over time.
- Refine Partner and Channel Strategies
As travel patterns continue to shift, understanding the dynamics of your booking channels and partnerships is critical. While business travel rebounded strongly in 2024, leisure travel has begun to plateau, creating an opportunity to reassess and refine your approach. Levering tools like dashboards to track key hotel suppliers, programs and rate codes can provide deeper insights into performance and guide more effective decisions.
Steps to Take:
- Analyze Performance: Examine metrics like revenue contribution, payment accuracy, and contract adherence for each partner, using dashboard insights to identify trends and areas for improvement.
- Make Informed Adjustments: Use these insights to renegotiate terms or realign partnerships to ensure they align with your long-term goals.
- Capitalize on In-Person Events
In-person events are back in full swing, offering unique opportunities to foster connections and drive business growth. Whether through industry conferences, corporate gatherings, or social events, these moments have become invaluable for networking and relationship building.
Steps to Take:
- Reintegrate Events into Your Strategy: Evaluate how in-person engagements can enhance your marketing and sales initiatives.
- Enhance Group and Meeting Capabilities: Ensure your business is equipped to support group bookings and event-related needs.
- Streamline Event Payments: Managing commissions for events can be complex, but tools like GroupPay by Onyx CenterSource make it easier than ever to handle these processes efficiently.
How Onyx CenterSource Can Support Your Success
In today’s competitive travel landscape, having the right tools and insights can make all the difference. At Onyx CenterSource, we specialize in payment solutions that empower travel and hospitality businesses to streamline operations and unlock new opportunities.
From automating commission payments to delivering actionable partner insights, our solutions are designed to help you navigate challenges and drive results.
As you prepare for the year ahead, remember success isn’t just about keeping pace with industry trends, it’s about turning them into opportunities for meaningful growth. With the right strategies, tools and partners your business can position itself for long-term success.
Here’s to a prosperous 2025!
