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Surprisingly, many people in hotel management are thinking, “We're waiting for the dust to settle." Think about what that actually means. Dust settles when the thing is finished. When the technology is understood, the vendors are sorted, the playbook is written — and your comp set has read it too. When the dust settles, everyone can see the same thing. And when everyone can see the same thing, nobody is ahead. The advantage is in the dust. It always has been. Almost four year

This week, a customer told me that Ladera had become a nag. Every Monday, a weekly review analysis surfaced the same recommendation: renegotiate the commission rate with one of the major OTAs. The math was sound. The channel mix was expensive, and the margin leak was real. But the contract was locked, and there was no version of that conversation that ended well. So the recommendation kept coming back, and every week it got ignored. I told them to type one sentence: "Add to m

The best idea in your 2027 budget meeting is the one nobody says out loud. Your director of revenue management has a theory about shoulder-season channel mix. Testing it means three weeks across the PMS, the channel manager, and marketing spend, and there's no analyst free. So they don't raise their hand. The idea isn't rejected. It's never proposed. That's what being resource constrained actually costs. Every analysis carried a price: analyst hours, a consultant engagement,

Every vendor pitch to a hotel management company opens with a list of things you have to fix first: standardize the PMS across forty properties, replace the RMS your revenue team actually trusts, pull IT off the roadmap for two quarters to clean the data. Once the company has been reorganized around the tool, the value shows up. That isn't a product. It's a renovation invoice with a login screen. The data does need cleaning, and it gets cleaned. The difference is that we don'

The question came near the end of the ownership call. Which campaigns last quarter brought guests who spent money on property, and which ones just filled rooms at a discount? It took nine days to answer. The PMS had the stays. The POS had the F&B and the spa. The CRM had the campaign that brought the guest through the door. Nothing joined them, so an analyst pulled exports, matched guests by last name and arrival date, dropped records that refused to reconcile, and delivered

Case studies had a good run. For decades they were how hotel commercial teams managed risk. Read about a hotel management company that adopted a platform, infer what it might do for your portfolio. Reasonable, when the alternative was a cold call and a slide deck. But case studies decay. The portfolio in the story is not your portfolio. The staff who ran that pilot left eighteen months ago. The product has shipped three releases since the screenshot. Their PMS stack, their ch

Every commercial team in hospitality knows how to build the report. Pull the numbers from the PMS, the POS, the channel manager, the CRM, stack them into a spreadsheet, book the meeting. It takes days, and at the end you have a report, which only ever tells you one thing: What happened. It does not tell you why. It does not tell you what to do about it before the next rate call. That is where the week and energy run out. The team spends its time assembling the picture and has

Most hotel groups are investing in tools that cut operating costs. It’s rational. Operations is the biggest expense line on the P&L, and a few points of efficiency is real money. There’s a second lever that gets less attention and can return as much or more. It’s the total net revenue the commercial team keeps per available room. Not just the room. Everything the guest spends once they arrive. Take a 100-room independent at 70% occupancy and a $180 ADR. That’s about $4.6M in

In 2010, Cornell surveyed nearly 500 hotel revenue managers about the future of the discipline. The consensus: revenue management would grow beyond the room. Total revenue, not just RevPAR. Profit, not just occupancy. Every revenue stream in the building, understood together. In 2017, Cornell asked again. The honest answer came back: still a work in progress. But belief had surged. Nearly two thirds of revenue leaders said total revenue management was coming. One respondent d

Five words from a customer last week, and my favorite product moment so far. Context: a hotel commercial leader asked Ladera how to drive more weekend revenue at one of their properties. The analysis dug through the operating data, surfaced revenue opportunities the team hadn't been looking for. One of the ideas leaned on a spa. The property doesn't have one. So the customer said so. And in seconds, the analysis rebuilt the recommendation around what the property actually has