AI SAUCE DIGEST #1,313
For Hospitality, Tourism & MICE Professionals
Thursday Edition • Shift Happens!® • James D. Feldman, CSP
Not because your property wasn’t right for the group.
Not because your sales manager didn’t work hard.
Because the competing property knew things your team didn’t. They knew what room rates the market was running. They knew the client had been burned by a similar venue six months ago. They knew the meeting planner’s top priority was F&B flexibility, not square footage.
They walked in with intelligence. You walked in with a brochure.
That gap has a name. It’s called competitive blind spots. And it costs properties millions in lost group business every year.
Meet the Research Tool Your Competitors Aren’t Using Yet.
It’s called Perplexity. And right now, it’s the most underused competitive advantage in group sales.
Here’s the simplest way to describe it: Perplexity is what you’d get if Google and ChatGPT had a smarter, more honest child. You ask it a research question. It searches the live web in real time, reads the actual sources, synthesizes the answer — and then shows you exactly where every piece of information came from.
No hallucinations. No stale training data. No wading through twelve pages of search results hoping to find the one paragraph that matters.
Just answers. With receipts.
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Why Not Just Use Google? Or ChatGPT?
Fair question. Here’s the honest answer.
Google gives you links. You still have to click, read, synthesize, and decide what matters. For a quick search, fine. For competitive research before a high-stakes RFP? You’re spending two hours you don’t have.
ChatGPT is brilliant at synthesis — but its knowledge has a cutoff date. Ask it about a competitor’s current group rates or a recently renovated ballroom and it may confidently give you information that’s a year out of date. In a market moving as fast as hospitality, that’s a liability.
Perplexity does what neither does alone. It pulls live data from the web, synthesizes it the way ChatGPT would, and cites every source so you can verify anything that matters. It’s faster than Google. It’s more current than ChatGPT. And for competitive intel, it’s in a different league than both.
Here’s What This Looks Like Before Your Next RFP Response.
Picture this: A meeting planner sends you an RFP for a 200-person corporate retreat. Three competing properties are already on the short list. You have 48 hours to respond.
The old playbook: pull your standard proposal template, fill in the dates and room counts, maybe tweak the F&B package, and hit send.
The Perplexity playbook: spend 20 minutes doing what your competitors won’t.
- Ask Perplexity what the competing properties have been promoting for group business in the last 90 days.
- Ask it what recent reviews say about their event execution — specifically from meeting planners, not leisure guests.
- Ask it what that client company’s recent events have looked like — themes, locations, headcounts, any public coverage.
- Ask it what group travel trends are dominant in that client’s industry right now.
Now you’re not just responding to an RFP. You’re responding to this client, at this moment, with real awareness of what they’ve seen before and what your competition is putting on the table.
That’s not a marginal improvement. That’s a different conversation entirely.
Your Copy-Paste Competitor Research Prompt
Go to perplexity.ai, start a new search, and paste this in. Replace the brackets with your specifics.
| I’m preparing an RFP response for a [number]-person [event type] in [destination].
Three competing properties on the short list are [Property A], [Property B], and [Property C]. Please research and give me:
1. What each competing property has been actively promoting for group business in the last 90 days (rates, packages, renovations, incentives).
2. What meeting planners and event professionals are saying about each property in recent reviews or industry coverage.
3. Any recent news about these properties (ownership changes, renovations, service disruptions, awards).
4. What group travel trends are currently driving decisions in the [client’s industry] sector.
Cite your sources for each point so I can verify what matters most. |
Run that once. Read what comes back. You’ll know more about your competitive landscape in 20 minutes than most properties learn in a month.
And because Perplexity cites its sources, if something looks off — or critically important — you can click straight through to the original article, review, or press release.
The Bigger Picture: Intelligence Is Now a Sales Skill.
The best group sales people have always been the best-prepared ones. They knew the client. They knew the competition. They walked in with context.
What’s changed is the cost of that preparation. It used to take hours. A skilled researcher, a dedicated pre-sales process, subscriptions to industry intelligence tools.
Now it takes 20 minutes and a free account at perplexity.ai.
The properties that figure this out first aren’t just going to win more RFPs. They’re going to win the ones that matter — the high-value groups, the repeat clients, the planners who remember who showed up prepared.
AI isn’t replacing your sales team. It’s making the good ones unstoppable
Want to Know Where Else Your Team Has Competitive Blind Spots?
I work with hospitality and MICE teams to identify exactly where AI tools like Perplexity can plug into your sales process, your RFP workflow, and your pre-event research — and build a plan to make it stick.
If you’re curious what a 90-day AI implementation roadmap looks like for your property, let’s talk.
➡ Reply to this email to book a consulting call with James.
jfeldman@shifthappens.com • www.shifthappens.com
Know a group sales manager who’s still doing comp research the old way? Forward this.
A little AI sauce enhances everything. Too much ruins it.
— James D. Feldman, CSP | The AI Concierge | ShiFt Happens!®
