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Good riddance to native reporting.
It was never that good anyway. If it were, the BI industry wouldn't exist. Tableau wouldn't exist. The entire third-party dashboard market — billions of dollars — exists precisely because native reporting in your PMS, your POS, your CRM was always an afterthought. A checkbox. Not a capability. So stop waiting for it to get better. It won't. It was never the point. Here's what's actually possible now. Every system you run generates raw data — reservations, spend, cancellations
Dave Goulden
5 days ago1 min read


The 20-Hour Blind Spot
Every week, hotel commercial teams burn 15 to 20 hours pulling numbers from five or six systems that were never designed to talk to each other. PMS says one thing. The marketing platform says another. POS data sits in its own world entirely. The team stitches it together in spreadsheets, makes their best guess, and walks into the ownership meeting hoping nobody asks the question they can't answer. Here's what that actually costs: your best campaign might be driving bookings t
Dave Goulden
Apr 11 min read


Beyond the Dashboard
For decades, the best tool that management had was a well-built dashboard. Pull the data. Format it. Present it. Repeat next week. It was progress. Real progress. But it always stopped at the same place. The harder questions were left to human judgment, institutional memory, and whatever bandwidth the analyst team had left after building the report. Why did this happen? What does it mean? What should we do? Those questions went into a queue. Got scheduled. Got answered days l
Dave Goulden
Mar 261 min read


Broken promises. Misleading metrics.
Sabine Filoni 's recent article nails half the attribution problem — hotels are paying Google and Meta for customers they already won through their own marketing. Last-click attribution has turned into an expensive shell game, and the industry keeps playing. But there's a bigger issue hiding in plain sight, and it's costing hotels even more than wasted ad spend. Here's what I mean: most hotels measure marketing success at the reservation and move on. But that booking isn't r
Dave Goulden
Mar 202 min read


Your big unlock.
Your revenue manager just spent four hours building a report that's already outdated. Not because they're slow. Because pulling data from your PMS, reconciling it with your POS, cross-referencing your CRM, and synthesizing it into something actionable takes four hours. Minimum. By the time they're done, the window to act has closed. Your systems work perfectly. The data is pristine. The problem isn't collection — it's the wasteland between "we have the data" and "we know what
Dave Goulden
Mar 171 min read


Stop Debating AI Judgment.
Watch What It Does. The AI community is tied up in knots over whether AI has "judgment." Wrong question. Here's what happened last week: A hotel GM was facing ownership with a year-over-year decline in room nights. Not the conversation you want to have. LaderaAI didn't just dump data on them. It dug through the noise and found the story: Direct sales up. Corporate and group business stronger. ADR increases that more than offset the occupancy dip. It positioned the presentat
Dave Goulden
Mar 131 min read


The Only Thing That Predicts AI Adoption
Aditya Agarwal built Facebook's first search engine. Spent years as Dropbox's CTO. Then he used AI for a weekend and felt "profound sadness" for all the years he'd lost to manual work. Over the next five days, he shipped more code than in the previous five years. He noticed something else. When hiring for AI-native roles, traditional credentials predicted nothing. Years of experience? Worthless. What predicted success? Personal projects. Side builds. Evidence of someone who
Dave Goulden
Mar 101 min read


Your best people are invisible.
Not because they're not performing. Because the data that proves it is trapped in systems nobody connects. The sales manager whose guests spend 40% more on F&B. The revenue strategy that cuts cancellations 15 points below portfolio average. The marketing campaign with a higher cost per booking—and dramatically higher revenue per stay. All happening. None visible. Here's what that costs you: Excellence you can't see can't be celebrated. Can't be rewarded. Can't be repeated. An
Dave Goulden
Mar 61 min read


The Hidden Cost of Hotel Portfolio Growth: Data Silos at Scale
The acquisition closes. Ownership wants portfolio-level data by Friday. But the new property runs a different PMS, has a different OTA mix, and none of it maps to what you already see across your other hotels. Every property you add is another data silo you're responsible for — and the hidden cost of growth is the time your team spends trying to translate them. There's a better way.
Dave Goulden
Feb 261 min read


AI Doesn't Hide Dysfunction — Especially in Hotel Marketing
A roundup from Hotel Management put it plainly: 'AI does not hide dysfunction.' The industry is investing heavily in AI for operations — pricing, housekeeping, scheduling. But what about upstream? Most hotel marketing teams are spending millions on acquisition with no visibility into which campaigns bring guests who cancel, and which bring guests who spend three times more at the restaurant. That's not a small oversight. That's six-figure budget decisions made with half the d
Dave Goulden
Feb 242 min read
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