Women’s History Month is one of our favorite times of year. It offers a moment to pause and recognize the meaningful contributions women make across industries and communities, including the impact they bring to GCommerce every day.

This year, we spoke with members of our female leadership team about their career journeys. They shared the moments that shaped their paths, the challenges they navigated, and the milestones that helped define where they are today.
In the conversations ahead, you’ll learn how each leader arrived in their current role and the advice they offer to others building their own careers. Their stories are a reminder that there is no single path to leadership. Every journey is different, and each one holds the power to inspire.

To celebrate Women’s History Month, we invite you to hear directly from the women helping lead GCommerce forward. Each leader of the GCommerce team will be answering the following questions:

What is one core belief you hold about using data to guide marketing or commercial strategy within a property or portfolio?

You can’t rely on a single report or platform to tell the full story. In digital marketing, we work across numerous channels and platforms, and each gives a window or helps provide hints towards the greater story. It’s important to break down these silos of data, come together as a team of experts across areas of marketing, and put the story together to identify opportunities, roadblocks, and ways to problem-solve to help our clients meet their business goals and objectives.

Can you walk us through a practical example of how data has informed a decision you’ve made around property visibility, guest targeting, or channel performance?

There are so many of these situations we work through on a daily basis, it’s hard to pick just one. One of my happy places is getting lost in portfolio-level data projects. One of the more recent projects I worked on was monitoring and analyzing portfolio-level GA4 data for AI search referral traffic. This looked across our entire portfolio of clients to monitor traffic from LLMs search engines, including ChatGPT and Perplexity. It contributed to a full study our search team completed, diving deep into what sources LLMs prefer to cite, which pages tend to get cited or sourced most often. This has guided our company’s development of AEO/GEO services to ensure our clients are well-positioned for this shift in consumer search behavior. Next up, this will include new case studies on the new tactics we’re launching to impact visibility for our clients.

Looking at that experience, what is the biggest takeaway for hoteliers who want to take a more performance-driven approach to hospitality marketing?

In order to get the most informed decisions from data, it’s important to break down silos and leverage resources that can help bring your data together from across channels and platforms for the full picture. The GA4 data only showed a small piece of the puzzle. LLMs and AI search is leading to less clicks to websites to find data, so it was important to also piece together information from other sources that could give us a clearer picture.

How does that takeaway connect to the way GCommerce approaches data, performance, and accountability in hospitality marketing today?

Without the hard work of our data team to ingest GA4 data into Google Big Query, query that data, and help surface it into custom reports, it would have been extremely difficult (maybe impossible) to quickly review data across the entire portfolio to guide insights and identify opportunities and benchmarking. Even then, data from that channel only told part of the story. By combining that data with other platforms’ data, including study inputs from the search team on actual SERPs and prompt results, Google Search Console data, and more, we were able to understand a more holistic story on the rise in AI search and its impact on our clients’ visibility and ultimately bookings.

Is there a woman who has mentored you along the way that you would like to recognize? How has her guidance shaped your career, and how do you aim to pay that mentorship forward to others?

I’ve been fortunate enough to have multiple female leaders who have greatly impacted my journey in marketing. The first is my long-time friend, Marissa Palmer, who introduced me to GCommerce and helped me get my foot in the door to my first marketing role out of college.

Next was my first boss and GCommerce’s first VP of Marketing, Denise Cooper. Her positive and nurturing attitude, along with her incredible energy and guidance, really helped shape how I look at data, consider marketing strategies, and maintain a focus on a client-first approach.

Finally, GCommerce’s current President, Lindley Cotton. I’ve been lucky to work alongside as well as under her leadership for over a decade. She’s shown me what a leader should be - considerate, supportive, and always human. Able to set a clear vision and lead an entire organization towards it. She also demonstrates an incredible ability to stay calm, even amongst the most chaotic of situations. I only hope that I can pay forward the opportunities, mentorship, advoacy and support these women have given me over the years.

I think if you have the power or are in a position to help, just do it! It’s so important to lift each other up; life can be so hard - even the smallest kindness and support can make a difference.