If you run a TravelTech or Hospitality Tech company and you're about to hire a commercial leader, there's a question worth asking before you write the brief.
What are you actually hiring for — sector knowledge, an established client network, or the ability to sell?
Most companies would say all three. And in an ideal world, they're right. But when forced to choose — when the candidate with the perfect hospitality background, the established hotel network and the existing client relationships sits across from the candidate with deep B2B SaaS sales experience and a track record of building markets from scratch in other sectors — TravelTech companies almost always pick the first one.
Sometimes that's the right call. Sometimes it isn't. The answer depends on factors that most hiring processes don't stop to evaluate honestly: how mature your product is, how developed the market is, how differentiated your value proposition is from what already exists. A company entering a market where relationships with hotel groups are the primary barrier needs someone who already has them. A company with a strong product in an underpenetrated market might need someone who knows how to build complex B2B pipeline from zero — and that person might be sitting in a completely different sector entirely.
What I can say from experience is this: dismissing a strong B2B SaaS commercial profile simply because they haven't sold to hotels before is often a costly mistake. The sector knowledge gap is closable. The commercial capability gap frequently isn't.
The comfort of the familiar
TravelTech is one of the most endogamic sectors I know when it comes to commercial hiring. And I say that having spent years working inside it — I understand why it happens, and I know the genuine value that hospitality network, existing client relationships and sector fluency create in a sales role.
But there's a difference between valuing sector knowledge and an established client base, and using them as the only filters.
When a TravelTech company opens a commercial search, the brief almost always includes some version of the same requirements: experience selling to hotels, an existing network of hotel decision-makers and clients, and a track record in hospitality technology. Sometimes those requirements are explicit. Sometimes they're implicit — the kind of thing that gets said in the debrief when a strong candidate is passed over: “They just don't know the industry.”
What rarely appears in the brief — and almost never appears in the debrief — is a serious assessment of B2B SaaS commercial methodology. How does this person qualify opportunities? How do they handle complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles selling to procurement committees, revenue managers and CTOs simultaneously? How do they build pipeline in a market where they have no existing relationships or clients? How do they manage renewals and account expansion in a subscription model? How do they coach a team to sell value rather than features in a sector where every competitor claims to solve the same problem?
These are the questions that define whether a commercial leader succeeds in TravelTech. They have very little to do with whether that person has previously sold to a hotel. And they are asked far less often than they should be.
The factor nobody puts in the brief — and that quietly determines everything
There's a fourth dimension that almost never appears in a commercial hiring brief, and that I've seen determine the outcome of a hire more often than any of the others: cultural understanding.
Not language. Cultural understanding.
The two are not the same — and confusing them is one of the most consistent and costly mistakes I see TravelTech companies make when hiring for markets outside their home base.
Speaking the language of a market is a baseline. It facilitates communication. It removes friction. But it tells you almost nothing about whether a commercial professional understands how decisions are actually made in that market, how trust is built, what pace is expected, what signals mean yes and what silences mean no. A candidate who speaks fluent Arabic but has never operated in the Gulf will approach a sales conversation in Saudi Arabia with assumptions built on a different cultural reality — and those assumptions, invisible on a CV and rarely tested in an interview, are what determine whether relationships convert into pipeline, and whether pipeline converts into revenue.
The same applies closer to home. Spanish and Latin American Spanish are the same language. The business cultures behind them are not. A commercial professional who has built their career in Spain will arrive in Mexico, Colombia or Argentina with assumptions about hierarchy, decision-making pace, relationship dynamics and negotiation style that can work against them — invisibly, and often irreversibly — before they've closed their first deal. The language opens the door. Understanding the culture is what keeps you in the room.
I've seen it from both sides. Hires that looked perfect on paper — the right language, the right sector background, the right network on LinkedIn — that failed within twelve months because the cultural gap was never assessed. And hires that raised eyebrows internally because they didn't fit the conventional profile, that succeeded precisely because they understood the market at a level that went beyond language and contacts.
The markets where TravelTech is growing fastest right now — Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, LATAM, Southern Europe — are all markets where cultural intelligence is not a soft skill. It is a commercial skill. It directly affects how quickly you build trust, how effectively you navigate complex organisational structures, and how sustainably you convert relationships into revenue.
And yet it is almost never on the brief. It is almost never formally assessed. And when a hire fails in one of these markets, cultural misalignment is rarely named as the cause — even when everyone in the room knows that's what happened.
What sector knowledge and an existing network actually mean — and what they don't
I want to be precise here, because the argument isn't that sector knowledge and client relationships don't matter. They do.
Understanding how a hotel P&L works, knowing who the real decision-maker is in a management company versus an owner-operator, being fluent in the language of RevPAR, PMS, distribution and guest experience — these things create credibility and accelerate conversations. Having existing relationships with hotel groups and technology buyers opens doors that would otherwise take months to unlock. A commercial leader who has to learn the basics of hotel operations while simultaneously building pipeline from zero is starting with a real handicap.
But sector knowledge is learnable. And client networks, while genuinely valuable at the start, have a shelf life — markets evolve, contacts move, and the companies that rely solely on a candidate's existing Rolodex rather than their capacity to build new relationships consistently find themselves exposed twelve to eighteen months in.
What is much harder to learn — and much harder to find — is the B2B SaaS commercial discipline that turns knowledge and relationships into sustainable revenue.
The ability to run a rigorous qualification process — MEDDIC, Challenger, whatever framework fits — and actually apply it consistently. The capacity to manage long, complex sales cycles without losing momentum. The skill to build a market from zero using methodology rather than existing contacts. The ability to manage a SaaS renewal cycle and grow accounts systematically over time. These things take years to develop and are genuinely scarce — inside TravelTech and everywhere else.
The irony is that B2B SaaS as a discipline is significantly more developed in sectors like telecoms, fintech, enterprise software and retail tech than it is in hospitality technology. The commercial rigour that TravelTech companies desperately need often exists in greater concentration precisely in the sectors they're most reluctant to hire from.
Prioritising sector experience and existing contacts over commercial capability is sometimes the right decision. More often than the results suggest, it isn't.
When a sector outsider outperformed the industry insiders
A few years ago, a leading Customer Data Platform for the hotel industry needed to build its commercial presence in the DACH market from scratch. No existing clients in the region. No local team. No established relationships with hotel groups or management companies.
The commercial professional they brought in didn't come from hospitality. Their background was in telecoms — building B2B markets from zero, managing complex multi-stakeholder sales cycles, developing strategic partnerships across EMEA. Deep B2B commercial methodology. No hotel network or existing client base to speak of.
Nearly seven years later, this commercial professional had built the DACH market into a multi-million dollar recurring revenue business, positioned the company among the top three players in the region, and won three out of four global sales awards in a single year — with two consecutive years in the company's top performer club.
This professional learned the sector. What they brought with them — the discipline, the qualification rigour, the capacity to build something from nothing using commercial methodology rather than existing relationships — couldn't have been imported from a hospitality career, because the hospitality sector rarely develops it at that level.
I'm not citing this as proof that sector experience and client networks don't matter. I'm citing it as evidence that the weighting most TravelTech companies apply to hospitality background and existing contacts over B2B SaaS capability in commercial hiring is not always justified by results.
The question worth asking before you write the brief
Before opening any commercial search, I'd encourage every TravelTech and Hospitality Tech company to sit with one question honestly:
Are we requiring hospitality sector experience, an existing client network and language skills because they're genuinely necessary for this role to succeed — or because they make us feel safer, and because it's what we've always done?
The answer might legitimately be that all of them are non-negotiable. There are roles where they are. A VP of Strategic Partnerships who needs to walk into a room with hotel ownership groups in Riyadh or Mexico City and be immediately credible — with existing relationships that open doors from day one and genuine cultural fluency that goes beyond language — requires a very different profile than a Head of Commercial who needs to build a disciplined B2B SaaS sales engine in an underpenetrated market.
But if the honest answer is that sector experience, existing contacts and language skills are comfort criteria rather than performance criteria — that they're about reducing the perceived risk of the hire rather than maximising the probability of commercial success — then the brief deserves to be rewritten.
The best commercial talent for your next hire may not have sold a single hotel room or signed a single hotel contract. They may be closing complex B2B deals in telecoms, fintech or enterprise software right now — building exactly the commercial muscle your business needs. The question isn't whether they exist. It's whether you're willing to look.
