At the time of the opening of its first hotel, the shareholder bank was focused on solving global problems of creating its own hotel business and did not have a narrow-profile experience of managing a hotel "from the inside". The staff of the newly opened Veliy Mokhovaya Hotel were focused on fulfilling the tasks of a specific facility and did not have the time and resources to build strategic plans for the future expansion of the network. The lack of professional specialists who could correctly translate the tasks of the shareholder bank in the language relevant to hoteliers and vice versa prevented the effective launch of the network.

The number of rooms of the first hotel was only 46 rooms, the creation of its own staff of professional employees was economically unprofitable for the shareholder bank due to the small size of the hotel. In this regard, it was decided to leave the operational part of the facility management to be provided by the full-time team of the hotel itself, and transfer the commercial part to SEA Company for its creation "from scratch" and strategic projection on the future hotel chain.

To implement this decision, the shareholder bank has selected the following packages:

• package "Hotel Sales Representative";
• consulting on connecting and configuring online sales channels (OTA);
• consulting on the general management of the hotel.

At the first stage, SEA Company team developed a marketing strategy for the opening hotel, determining its positioning in the market, USP (unique sales points), competitors and target audiences in the B2B and B2C segments. Together with the concept, proposals for renovation and some changes in the facility itself were prepared so that the hotel would correspond to the proposed level.

Having approved the strategy and technical changes with the shareholder bank, the staff of the hotel engaged in their implementation, and the consultants of SEA Company built a sales department. For this purpose, a marketing base, sales policy, pricing and tariff policy, sales forecasting through various channels for the calendar year were created. Among the promotion channels were OTA's (online travel agencies), whose work was placed in a separate block due to the high priority for a particular hotel.

After agreeing on the budget and the plan for the year, the SEA Company's sales department began to implement a commercial strategy, taking over all the functions of the department: from finding new customers to signing contracts and starting bookings. At the same time, SEA Company maintained its own standards of quality of services provided and all contracts were signed directly between B2B clients and the hotel to minimize the risk of the hotel losing the entire customer base after the end of the contract with SEA Company.

The "PR Support" package was not fully integrated into this project, but its parts, such as the coordination of a photo shoot, design services and the creation of marketing materials, were carried out according to separate tasks of the shareholder bank.

Based on the created working structure, SEA Company standardized all processes for the customer and transferred them for the purpose of subsequent independent scaling to other network objects.

The activities carried out at the pre-opening stage of the hotel to create and launch a sales department made it possible to quickly and efficiently enter the hotel services market, as well as fully load the hotel from the first days of its operation. Veliy Hotels employees independently applied the standards developed by SEA Company to open a new hotel in the city of Suzdal.