The Persistence Trap

Why familiar problems survive in successful travel businesses and what actually breaks the cycle.

September 2026

There is a particular kind of business review that most senior leaders in travel and hospitality will recognise. An important opportunity comes up. Almost everyone in the room agrees it matters. People can explain the problem clearly, describe the previous attempts to fix it, and name the departments involved. And yet, months or years later, it is still unresolved.

This article looks at why that happens, even inside capable, well-run businesses, and sets out what actually needs to change to break the pattern.

It covers three things: how operating models and measurement hierarchies quietly protect familiar problems rather than solve them, why shared foundations matter more than any single initiative, and how businesses should assess and sequence investment so that the right fixes actually get funded and finished.

A Familiar Story, Told Differently Each Time

In our work at PACE Dimensions, this is a recurring pattern. Capable people understand their businesses and work hard to improve them. But the way responsibilities, measures and investment decisions fit together can make a familiar problem surprisingly difficult to solve. The commercial opportunity lies partly in fixing the problem itself, and partly in changing the conditions that allowed it to persist in the first place.

Consider a hotel group trying to increase profitable stays. Marketing delivers more website visits. Revenue management protects average rates. The contact centre reduces handling time. Technology completes its scheduled releases. Every function can report progress, and yet guests still struggle to find suitable availability or complete a booking.

This gap between departmental success and business performance is not a hypothetical risk. Across the travel industry, direct booking abandonment sits around 80 per cent, among the highest of any e-commerce sector, and SiteMinder’s Changing Traveler Report 2025 found that more than half of travellers abandon a booking because of a poor digital experience rather than price.¹ ² That is a striking number for an industry where every department involved in the booking journey can, individually, point to work delivered on schedule. SkyCom Call Center

The gap between departmental success and business performance deserves management attention.

Where the Problem Actually Sits

The Operating Model

The starting point is the operating model: how the company assigns accountability, makes decisions and organises work. Staff need to understand the business outcomes their work should improve, and have the authority to act across the boundaries that constrain them.

This requires a clear hierarchy of measures. Sustainable profitability and customer value should connect to operational outcomes such as completed stays, contribution after distribution and incentive costs, and repeat business. Conversion, cancellations and service failures help explain those outcomes. Campaign response rates and processing times help teams decide where to intervene. All of these remain useful, provided everyone understands their place in the hierarchy.

An offer that generates bookings may simply subsidise customers who would have booked anyway. A shorter service call may leave a guest needing to call again. A business can reward both activities while quietly paying for the consequences elsewhere. Shared definitions and credible comparisons with what would otherwise have happened help expose these trade-offs. Cloudbeds’ 2026 State of Independent Hotels Report offers a useful illustration of this kind of hidden trade-off: OTA bookings cancel at roughly twice the rate of direct bookings, 21.8 per cent against 10.6 per cent, a gap that reflects how channel strategy and guest commitment interact in ways a single conversion metric will never show.³ Hospitality Net

Accountability With Authority

Accountability must then carry practical authority. Someone responsible for improving the booking journey needs influence over priorities and committed capacity from relevant functions. Marketing’s contribution is unnecessarily restricted when its role is simply to execute a campaign brief, rather than to help address the reasons customers fail to book in the first place, including the proposition and experience itself.

Customer segmentation illustrates why that mandate matters. A frequent guest may need no incentive at all, while someone who has stopped searching may need help overcoming a specific obstacle. Marketing aimed at increasing stays should recognise current travel needs and identify where intervention can genuinely change behaviour. Selecting the same valuable customers repeatedly can produce reassuring response rates while leaving the real opportunity unexplored, a theme we explored in more depth in Demand Orchestration, where the distinction between customer targeting and genuine commercial targeting is the difference between a campaign that performs and one that solves the actual problem.

Functional leaders still own professional standards and specialist skills. But a business leader should own the journey’s performance over time, supported by a stable team drawn from the functions needed to improve it. Incentives and performance reviews should reinforce that shared result. Without changes to capacity and decision rights, a new steering committee simply adds meetings while the original constraints remain exactly where they were.

“A new steering committee adds meetings while the original constraints remain.”

Foundations, Not Just Fixes

The second lesson concerns foundations: consistent information and business rules, reliable processes, and technology that different teams can reuse. Their importance becomes clearer when leaders examine why seemingly straightforward improvements repeatedly require manual work or expensive integration.

A common view of available accommodation illustrates the point. If the same information and eligibility rules support the website, service agents and marketing, the business can offer customers more useful alternatives and fulfil them consistently. This is precisely the shift we set out in The Next-Generation Commercial Engine: moving from systems that publish a fixed set of options to a commercial layer that manufactures the right offer, in real time, from a single, granular, shared source of truth. Reliable inventory also improves allocation decisions, and a shared capability can support several commercial initiatives at once, with each benefiting from improvements made by the others.

The same logic applies to understanding failed bookings. A common explanation of why customers abandon a journey can direct website repairs, trigger appropriate assistance and improve future offers. If each department records failures differently, the business pays repeatedly to interpret the same customer problem, over and over, from scratch.

Foundations also change the economics of future innovation. Separating customer channels from tightly connected legacy systems can reduce the risk and effort involved in making changes. Automated testing can help teams release improvements without repeatedly disrupting existing services. These benefits belong in the investment case alongside immediate revenue gains, not as a footnote to them.

There is a discipline here. A foundation needs named users and specific business decisions or journeys it will improve. Build the smallest usable part that supports a valuable application, then extend it as further needs become clear. An indefinite programme to perfect all the data or replace every system can postpone the very benefits that justify the investment in the first place.

Managing the Portfolio, Not Just the Project

This leads to a different approach to managing the project portfolio. Ranking initiatives by their individual returns is useful, but incomplete. A modestly ranked enabling project may be essential to several highly attractive proposals. Delay it, and their value slips too. Similarly, a small early intervention may be valuable simply because it tests an assumption before the company commits to a much larger investment.

Each initiative therefore needs two assessments: the value it can produce on its own, and the value it enables elsewhere. Leaders should also assess delivery capacity, dependencies and confidence in the underlying assumptions. Shared benefits must be counted once across the portfolio. Otherwise, several convincing business cases can end up claiming credit for the same additional stay.

A practical sequence might begin by fixing critical booking failures while establishing consistent failure data. Teams can then use that evidence to improve alternatives and assisted recovery. Alongside this work, marketing can test which customer needs and offers it can actually influence, a discovery process we describe in more detail in The Buying Concierge, where understanding what a guest is genuinely trying to achieve, rather than simply what they searched for, becomes the basis for the whole commercial relationship. Automation follows once those decisions prove effective. Early design can overlap, while wider deployment waits for the capabilities and evidence it requires.

The multiplier effect comes from these connections. Better information improves targeting. Reliable availability makes the targeted offer bookable. A simpler journey converts more of that interest, and timely assistance recovers some of the remaining failures. Improving several connected steps can increase the return on each one, although testing must still establish how much additional value the combination genuinely creates.

Portfolio management also means deciding what to stop. Regular reviews should examine realised benefits and whether evidence has changed the case for continuing. They should resolve competition for scarce people. Constantly redirecting teams in response to the latest request destroys continuity and delays usable results. Priorities need to respond to evidence within a stable strategic direction, not to whichever problem shouted loudest that quarter.

There is good external evidence for what disciplined cross-functional working can actually achieve. In one widely cited McKinsey example, a manufacturer that established genuine cross-functional accountability for an end-to-end customer process, rather than leaving it split across sales, engineering and service, lifted first-time-right delivery from 65 per cent to over 80 per cent, and cut post-installation call centre requests by a third.⁴ The improvement did not come from a new tool. It came from someone owning the outcome across the boundaries that had previously constrained it. mckinsey

For public companies, quarterly performance pressure makes that direction especially important. Immediate delivery matters, and no one is arguing otherwise. The risk arises when the quarter becomes the planning horizon, and every initiative must justify itself through an isolated near-term gain. Repeated tactical fixes can quietly consume the capacity needed to remove their underlying causes.

Lessons Learned

Pulling this together, three lessons stand out from the pattern we see repeatedly in client work.

First, a familiar problem rarely persists because no one has identified it. It persists because responsibility for solving it sits across several functions, none of which has the mandate, capacity or measures to own the outcome rather than their own piece of it.

Second, foundations are not a delay to commercial benefit. They are what makes commercial benefit repeatable. A fix that depends on manual work or one-off integration will need to be rebuilt the next time the problem resurfaces, usually in a slightly different form.

Third, the investment case for any single initiative is incomplete until it accounts for what it enables elsewhere.Treating each project as a standalone bet, ranked purely on its own return, is how genuinely enabling work gets deprioritised in favour of whatever looks best in isolation.

The Takeaway

Leaders should define the optimal target state in business terms: what should customers be able to do, how should inventory reach the demand best suited to it, and who remains accountable for making that happen. That vision needs enough specificity to guide investment and to test whether each proposed step genuinely advances the business, while still evolving as customer needs and evidence change.

The next time an executive team confronts a problem everyone has recognised for years, the same instinct is worth resisting. Don’t ask what will fix it this time. Ask what has kept it broken until now. The answer usually sits in conflicting objectives, fragmented ownership, or a foundation that has been repeatedly deferred. Addressing those conditions gives the immediate initiative a genuinely better chance of success, and leaves the business more capable of delivering the next one.

About PACE Dimensions

PACE Dimensions is a research and consulting firm founded in 2010 with deep industry experience and a practitioner’s expertise in helping Travel and Hospitality companies excel through strategic clarity and operational excellence. The firm specialises in translating market insights and strategic imperatives into practical initiatives that deliver measurable performance improvement. Its consultants bring proven track records of success working with hotel groups of all sizes across upscale and luxury segments, combining rigorous analysis with pragmatic implementation approaches that drive sustainable results.

References

¹ Hotel Online (2026). Why Do Guests Abandon Hotel Bookings? What Every Hotelier Needs to Know. https://www.hotel-online.com/news/why-do-guests-abandon-hotel-bookings-what-every-hotelier-needs-to-know

² SiteMinder (2025). Changing Traveler Report 2025, cited in Hotel Online (2026).

³ Cloudbeds (2026). State of Independent Hotels Report, cited in Hospitality Net (2026). What can hotels do to decrease their cancellation rates? https://www.hospitalitynet.org/panel/revenue-optimization/what-can-hotels-do-to-decrease-their-cancellation-rates-2

⁴ McKinsey & Company. Making Collaboration Across Functions a Reality. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/making-collaboration-across-functions-a-reality