Writing on Hospitality.
5 pieces across the Hospitality cluster. Field notes, not thought leadership. back to all insights.
What this cluster covers
A hospitality operation knows more than its systems record. These articles are about that gap: the returning guest who looks new to every system you own, the ten minutes before check-in where margin leaves, what the channel mix hides about which guests actually pay, and what the floor knows that reaches no record at all. None of the four is a reporting problem. They are design problems, and they surface as margin rather than as an error message. A PMS that cannot recognise a regular still produces clean reports. Written for hotel and venue operators who already have the systems in place and suspect the numbers describe a different property from the one they walk through every morning.
The night audit closes the books and loses the reasons
Every property already runs one process that stops the day and writes it down. The close keeps the totals and drops the state that explains them, which is why nobody can answer why last week moved.
Read →The floor knows before the system does, and nothing records it
A hotel's most reliable sensor is a person. The housekeeper knows a room has a problem hours before any system does. Whether that observation ever becomes a row depends entirely on how much friction stands between noticing and reporting.
Read →Your returning guest looks new to every system you own
The same guest booked through an OTA, paid at the bar under a room number, joined the wifi under a personal address and reviewed under a nickname. Four systems hold four different people, and none of them is the guest.
Read →The ten minutes before check-in where your margin leaks
Ask a hotel revenue manager where the margin is and they point at the rate card. Ask where it leaks and the honest answer is the ten minutes before check-in — the upsell not offered, the room assigned by habit, the rate held too long. Most of it is decided on gut feel.
Read →What your channel mix hides about your best guests
Every hotel knows its channel mix. Almost none know what a guest from each channel is actually worth after the channel takes its cut. That gap — spread across five dashboards that never reconcile — is where the margin story falls apart.
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