“Open” is a status. It is not evidence of movement.
An inquiry may remain in the pipeline while the team waits for pricing nobody owns, the customer waits for a proposal, or an automated follow-up continues against an offer that is no longer valid.
Seven signals worth reviewing
| Signal | Management question |
|---|---|
| No accountable owner | Who is responsible for the complete inquiry? |
| Unresolved routing | Which hotel or team should act? |
| SLA breach | What prevented the expected response? |
| Missing requirements | Has the customer been asked for the information needed to proceed? |
| Feasibility unresolved | Is the team waiting on real data or simply not acting? |
| No complete actionable quote | What still lacks a decision or price? |
| Follow-up overdue or invalid | Is the next contact still appropriate to the current context? |
No single signal proves that a request is lost. Their combination creates the useful exception list.
Separate customer waiting from hotel waiting
An inquiry waiting for the customer to review a valid proposal is different from one waiting for the hotel to confirm a meeting room.
Work responsibility should therefore be explicit. It prevents management from treating legitimate customer time as team inactivity and prevents internal delay from being hidden behind a generic “pending” status.
Inspect the commercial object that blocks movement
Groups and MICE work stalls in different places:
- the Inquiry may lack routing or requirements;
- an Event or Function may lack a viable space configuration;
- the Quote may be partial or waiting for approval;
- the Share may have expired or point to a superseded version;
- the customer may have replied and invalidated the next automated message;
- the accepted agreement may require a new amendment rather than another sales-stage change.
The review becomes useful when it identifies the object and decision blocking progress, not merely the number of days since the last activity.
Turn the review into an outcome
Every exception review should produce one of a small number of results: a new owner, a specific action, a request for missing information, a viable alternative, a current quote, a scheduled follow-up or an explicit closure with a reason.
That is how the pipeline stops being a list of open records and becomes an operating system for incoming demand.