Dragonfly Strategists
Carving the Way towards a Sustainable Recovery

As one of the oldest industries in the world, the hospitality space has experienced more than its fair share of global disasters. Yet, with persistence, determination, and innovation, the industry has survived and thrived. The last two years have been unlike any—unprecedented and arduous. The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc globally and the hospitality industry is one among the worst hit. Today, hoteliers are on an ardent pursuit to recover from the drastic pandemic-induced impacts, pinning their hope on restructuring their team around commercial strategy. As a relatively new concept to the hotel industry that consolidates various roles, including revenue, marketing, sales, and distribution under one umbrella, supported by IT, building a sound commercial strategy can be a tough grind for them. This is precisely where Dragonfly Strategists can help!

Dragonfly Strategists is a boutique and advisory services firm that specializes in helping hospitality companies navigate the road to recovery in the most agile and efficient manner. Since its beginning in 2016, the company has been bringing executive level experience and expertise to develop actionable strategies and transform hotels into higher revenues and improved performance. Dragonfly Strategists’ business operations are built around a set of values that they follow as a women-led team to achieve great things, innovate, be intentional in decision-making, and act with integrity and accountability along with giving back to our cause, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

“We’re not just another revenue management company; instead, we position ourselves as a commercial and IT strategy firm,” says Caryl S. Helsel, the founder and CEO of Dragonfly Strategists. “We pride ourselves on our unique, holistic approach that integrates revenue management, distribution, guest experience, operations, sales, marketing, reservations, and information technology on a single pane of glass.” By doing this, Dragonfly Strategists offers a truly unified commercial and IT strategy that delivers optimum results on time and within budget.

As an all-inclusive commercial and IT strategy expert, Dragonfly Strategists recommends and implements custom strategies for every phase of the hotel lifecycle. Dragonfly Strategists also brings longstanding experience and meaningful strategies to the table that help clients augment their business excellence and thereby improve their revenue, performance, and guest experience.

One of Dragonfly Strategists’ services that has gained a lot of traction during the pandemic-inflicted years is system, process, IT, guest experience, and talent audits. The company’s team of experts excels in addressing all hardships pertaining to inappropriately installed, configured, or integrated systems. “We also provide pre-opening services, where we serve as the extension of their team to perform market feasibility assessments and project manage the revenue systems installations to provide a streamlined opening,” adds Caryl.

What gives Dragonfly Strategists a competitive edge is its team-based approach and in-depth industry expertise to solve clients’ complex issues quickly. For instance, for revenue services, the company assigns a revenue strategist who is responsible for creating strategies to improve their performance. Dragonfly Strategists also deploys a distribution manager to facilitate execution of the strategy in revenue systems. Not just that, clients will have an executive account manager assigned to support the project along with the company’s VP of Distribution and Operations, Erica Penley-Claycomb and the company’s VP of Revenue & Analytics, Alise Deeb, overseeing it to collaboratively lead them to success.

Unlike a typical hospitality advisory firm that takes a one-size-fits-all approach, Dragonfly Strategists understands the specific needs of each market, owner, company, and property to deliver custom strategies. They offer a proprietary BI tool that provides automated report to clients, helping them gain more visibility on business operations and performance. “We bring a lot of executive-level insights that not only help clients succeed today but also have a futuristic outlook,” adds Caryl. Moving ahead, Dragonfly Strategists is planning to expand more into the European markets. From a business perspective, they envision to drastically enhance their advisory side of things while maintaining a steady pace with our subscription services offerings. “All our efforts are strategically directed towards helping our clients outrun the competition and align well with the market needs of the future,” concludes Caryl.