Selling to hotels in Punta Cana and the east: a guide for suppliers

The east concentrates most of the country's air-arrival tourism. Between January and April 2025, Punta Cana airport received 72.6% of the non-resident foreign passengers who arrived in the Dominican Republic by air, according to the Central Bank. For a supplier, that means heavy consumption in a few zones, far from where the warehouse and the sales team usually sit, which is Santo Domingo and the Cibao.

The buyer does not look like the one in the channel you know, either. A supermarket buys to resell. A hotel buys to consume, almost always against a fixed price per guest per night. If you come from the traditional or the modern trade, what you already know about distribution channels in the Dominican Republic helps with logistics, not with the sale.

Many of the hotels also belong to chains headquartered outside the country: brand standards, contracts in other languages and decisions made in another time zone. If your company was founded by someone from abroad, the risk is applying your home-country playbook to a buyer who runs on relationships, references and patience. On our Punta Cana page we explain how we handle that translation between the two worlds.

In a large resort, at least four people with different problems touch the purchase of any category. If you only talk to purchasing, you are pitching the person who executes the decision, not the one who makes it or the one who can block it. This is Webster and Wind's buying center applied to a hotel. The full model is in the B2B buying center guide, and the decision-maker map is the tool we use to bring it down to job titles.

The user (chef, executive housekeeper, chief engineer) does not sign, but their veto is close to final. Purchasing protects the process and needs to be able to justify the choice. The comptroller decides quietly: a payment term outside policy stalls a vendor setup that everyone else supported.

Sequence matters. First the user, with a technical trial. Then purchasing, with the result. Terms come last. Do it the other way around and purchasing asks for a price with no context and compares you on a spreadsheet that the incumbent always wins.

The most useful difference between hotels is not size. It is where the decision lives.

Which one you approach first is a prioritization problem, not a question of ambition. A supplier who bets everything on a chain can spend months in vendor approval without billing. One who works only with independents bills quickly, with a volume ceiling and more collection risk. The winnability matrix usually points to a mixed portfolio: independents to earn references, a local group as the anchor account and one or two chains in the approval process.

In chain hotels, purchasing only issues orders to approved vendors. If you are not on that list, it does not matter that the chef loves your product: they buy from you once out of petty cash and never again.

Vendor approval has an administrative side (commercial registration, RNC tax ID, tax receipts, references and, depending on the category, sanitary registrations, spec sheets and safety data sheets) and an operational side (supply capacity, coverage of the east, insurance and, at some chains, an audit). Each group sets its own requirements. An incomplete file goes to the bottom of the pile.

Our recommendation: prepare the vendor approval file before the first sales meeting, in the group's language, with an internal owner who keeps it current. It is the first real contact with your company and a preview of how you will invoice. The sanitary, tax or legal requirements for each product are for a local specialist to resolve, not for us.

At an all-inclusive, the guest does not pay for what they consume. The hotel does, and every category is a cost line tracked against occupancy.

The buyer's yardstick is cost per guest per night or per occupied room, not the price of the container. A detergent that costs more per liter but delivers more wash cycles, or an amenity dispenser that keeps guests from taking three bottles home, can lower total cost even as unit price goes up.

For beverage and food brands there is a second layer. Many all-inclusives run a standard offer alongside a premium one, which the guest pays for separately or receives in higher room categories. The standard tier brings volume and little visibility. The premium tier, the opposite. Decide which one you are after before you negotiate: price, format and support change in each case. The offer ladder holds the method for designing those tiers.

A hotel does not buy the same way when it opens as when it operates. Openings and major renovations are when equipment gets decided. After that, the hotel buys replenishment and consumables.

There is a tax factor worth knowing. Law 158-01 on tourism development, in its article 4 as amended by Law 184-02, provides for an exemption from import duties and ITBIS (the Dominican VAT) on the machinery, equipment, materials and furnishings needed for the construction and initial outfitting of projects covered by the regime (text on the DGII site). For a local equipment supplier, this means that at an opening you may be competing against tax-exempt direct imports. In replenishment, the direct importer loses that edge, and local stock and response time weigh more. Whether a given project is covered is a question for its tax advisor.

At openings you sell to the developer and the pre-opening team, with long cycles and large orders. In operation you sell to the hotel, with recurring orders and constant replacement risk. They are two different funnels, and they are measured separately.

For the hotel, logistics is not a selling point. It is a requirement. The selling point is how you respond when something fails: strict dock hours, access controls, small orders that do not fill a truck out of Santo Domingo, cold chain. A stockout in high season is not forgiven the way one in September is.

If you work through a distributor, the usual mistake is handing over the relationship too. The distributor moves cases. The hotel's user still needs to know whom to call. Sales and logistics can run on separate tracks.

Hotels pay on terms, and groups with centralized accounts payable pay on long terms that are hard to negotiate. It is not bad faith. It is policy. The problem is the supplier who never modeled it and discovers in month three that it is financing its best customer with its own working capital.

Before the first purchase order, decide four things. The credit limit for each account, regardless of what they ask for. Written terms: payment period, late payment, how discrepancies are disputed. An invoicing protocol per account, because an invoice that does not match the purchase order goes back to the end of the queue and the clock starts over. And who approves the invoice inside the hotel, usually the receiving clerk or the department head before it reaches the comptroller. That name belongs on the decision-maker map.

Average days to collect per account is a commercial indicator, not just a financial one. An account that bills a lot and pays late can be worth less than a smaller one that pays on time.

Demand in the east follows air arrivals, with higher occupancy during the northern hemisphere winter, groups and weddings spread across the year and slow months when maintenance and renovations get done. Every hotel knows its own curve. Ask for it; do not assume it. Then decide three things:

• When to sell. Nobody trials a new supplier in high season. Ask each account when it closes its budget and reviews suppliers, and plan backward from that date.
• How much stock to hold. Your forecast follows your customers' occupancy, not your history divided by twelve.
• When to sell maintenance. Engineering concentrates shutdowns and renovations in the slow months. That is the moment for spare parts and service contracts.

A sample lets the user give an opinion. A pilot lets the hotel decide. A reference means the next hotel does not need its own pilot. Most suppliers stop at step one: a sample with no plan ends in an "it's fine" and a drawer. A pilot has a bounded scope, a fixed duration and a success criterion written down before it starts.

Without a picture of the starting point, each party remembers the result its own way. With a signed baseline, the result is read against what was agreed, and the follow-up conversation is about terms, not impressions.

The sequence:

1. Pick an account with a visible problem. Deliverable: the account, the problem and the user who suffers it.
2. Design the pilot with the user and validate it with purchasing. Deliverable: the pilot sheet, with the table above filled in.
3. Measure the baseline and sign it. Deliverable: the starting picture, signed by all three parties.
4. Run it and close with a decision. Deliverable: a one-page report and a proposal for terms.
5. Turn the result into a reference. Deliverable: a documented case, with the hotel's permission.

Step five is the one most often forgotten and the one worth the most. In a relationship market like the Dominican one, "they're using it at such-and-such hotel and it works" opens more doors than any brochure.

The most common mistake is looking only at revenue, which counts what already happened. It does not tell you whether you are getting into the right accounts, or whether your biggest customer is costing you money.

Your revenue from a hotel rises and falls with its occupancy: comparing months without adjusting for it leads to false conclusions. Ask at least for the occupied room nights of the months you compare.

These indicators are reviewed at a period committee, which decides which accounts get pushed, which pilots get closed and which customers get repriced. We organize them in a commercial playbook, with an action sheet for each initiative.

Selling unit price to a buyer who measures cost per stay. The cause: the sales pitch was written for retail, and nobody adapted it.

Talking only to purchasing. It is the contact who answers email, so it looks like the customer. The user, who holds the veto, has never seen the product working, and the comptroller discovers the terms when everything has already been agreed.

Depending on a single account or a single distributor. It happens when the first large account arrives early and absorbs the team. If its purchasing director changes, you are left with no portfolio.

Carrying over the home-country playbook unchanged. It often happens to companies founded by a European or North American entrepreneur who already sold to hotels in their own market. The formal processes look alike. The weight of relationships, references and the pace of decisions do not. The local layer exists to adapt those pieces without touching the method.

Hiring local sales reps with no scorecard. You hire someone with contacts in the hotels and ask them to "go sell." With no target accounts and no indicators, their contact list is your only commercial asset, and it leaves when they do.

Take, as a hypothesis, a distributor of cleaning and laundry products based in Santo Domingo. It sells well to the modern trade and to offices, and it wants to get into the resorts of the east. A sales rep drives out to Bávaro once a month, leaves samples and picks up occasional orders from two independents.

The diagnosis: with no vendor approval file, the chains cannot buy from it; it talks to purchasing and not to housekeeping; it argues price per liter; and it has not calculated the working capital a large account demands.

The policy: focus on laundry and rooms, where it can demonstrate cost per occupied room, with the two independents as references and a local group as the anchor account. The actions: prepare the file, run a pilot with the executive housekeeper at one of the group's properties, sign the baseline and set credit limits.

We do not know what the pilot would show. We do know that, whatever the outcome, the company would have something it lacks today: a data point against a baseline and a documented decision.

1. List your twenty target accounts in the east and classify them as international chain, local group or independent. Mark the ones where you are already an approved vendor.
2. Draw the decision-maker map for your top three accounts. For each one, write down who the user is, who buys, who approves the invoice and who can veto you. Wherever you have no name, you know what is missing.
3. Rewrite your main argument in cost per guest or per occupied room. If you cannot calculate it, that is the first trial you need to design.
4. Review your vendor approval file. Documents, spec sheets, insurance and references from other hotels, in the language of the chains you are targeting.
5. Calculate the working capital your current portfolio requires using each account's real collection terms, and set a credit limit per hotel before the next purchase order.