Outsmart the Market.
Outperform the Competition
Outsmart the Market.
Outperform the Competition
Hotels are still running shorthanded, and it’s not a “minor inconvenience.” When you’re short at the front desk, housekeeping, and maintenance, every guest issue takes longer, mistakes multiply, and your best people burn out first. AHLA’s survey work shows a majority of hotels still reporting staffing shortages—meaning the problem is structural, not seasonal.
OTAs can deliver volume, but they also siphon margin and weaken rate control. Phocuswright has documented how central hotels are to OTA bookings and how large OTAs are in the overall online travel market—meaning dependency isn’t theoretical. Add “secondary OTA” leakage, and you can lose control of pricing, parity, and the guest relationship in one ugly week.
OTAs are a problem. The bigger problem is treating them like autopilot—letting a third party decide what you sell, when you sell it, and at what price. If OTAs represent a major share of your occupancy, they require active, daily oversight—because this is often your largest customer channel.
Labor is the biggest “controllable” expense—but only if it’s managed with discipline. It doesn’t politely scale down when demand softens, and mismanagement turns payroll into a leak: wage pressure, overtime, and turnover quietly eat the margin even when ADR holds. Here’s the real trap: bad labor management inflates expenses without improving service—and too often the money gets burned on unproductive hours instead of rewarding the team members who actually move the needle.
The most common labor-cost problem isn’t pay—it’s mismanagement. A large share of payroll gets wasted without improving the hotel’s performance or properly rewarding the team members who actually deliver results.
Revenue isn’t simply “down” or “up.” It’s volatile — and the forecast can flip fast. Daryon and Tourism Economics have even noted what would be a rare full-year U.S. RevPAR decline in 2025.
But that’s the national average. On the ground, it’s a split-screen economy: some hotels are getting squeezed, while others are still beating 2024 results or outrunning their comp set through sharper execution and market fit.
Hire the right revenue manager. In practice, hotels fall into four buckets:
Read more at Managers Forum:
www.ManagersForum.org/blog
Sales sit at the center of a hotel’s performance. Done right, sales generate the cash flow you need to fix problems the practical way—staffing, service, upkeep, systems, all of it. But it only works if your sales strategy keeps pace with today’s market. Fall behind, and you’re selling yesterday’s hotel to tomorrow’s guest.
It’s like trying to sell a rotary phone to Gen Alpha. And frankly, a lot of “sales” out there is exactly that.
Hire the right revenue manager. In practice, hotels fall into four buckets:
Hotels run on handoffs—and handoffs fail. “No one told me” is how mistakes become routine and accountability evaporates. Cornell research shows that focused training works best when managers are directly involved—it measurably improves service effectiveness and guest satisfaction.
And here’s the rule: what gets measured gets improved. If you don’t document SOPs, shift notes, and training, you’re not managing—you’re guessing. Use secure, digital reporting and tracking that’s time-stamped, searchable, and accessible anywhere for authorized users. Paper logs are passé, unreliable, and always “missing” right when you need them most.
Use a digitized reporting system and Digital Management Memo tools—like the ones Daryon Hotels uses and provides to partner hotels. Operators and managers can access updates and reports anytime, anywhere, because they’re stored in a secure database and automatically emailed to designated leaders. These tools also keep team members accountable and make performance measurement far more accurate.
And stop relying on paper reports and forms—they’re easily misplaced when you need them most, time-consuming to track down, and often impossible to search when you’re looking for one specific item.
The unmanaged Minutes-per-room (MPR) targets can backfire fast: rush housekeeping and you buy complaints, refunds, and burnout. Many benchmarks land standard cleans around 20–30 minutes, depending on room type and standards. The real housekeeping labor issue isn’t whether you set 20, 30, or 45 minutes—it’s how rooms are assigned and how performance is monitored.
* For more details, contact support@daryon.com. DHI can provide manual or digital HK tools covering MPR, quality, and inventory. Basic tools are available on Daryon.AI.
Fake reviews are a business toxin: they distort demand, punish honest operators, and reward bad behavior. The FTC’s Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule (effective Oct. 21, 2024) targets fake reviews and allows civil penalties for knowing violations. But enforcement takes time—while the ranking and reputation hit can be immediate. A GM ignores this at their own peril.
The most important move is simple: catch the complaint—whether it’s valid or not—before the guest walks out the door. Resolve it privately, professionally, and fast—before it turns into a public review storm.
That’s where Better Hotel Bureau (BHB) comes in. BHB gives guests and hotels a private, respectful channel to work issues out—quietly, directly, and without the internet’s pile-on.
Read the article:
Extortion by star rating
https://BetterHotelBureau.org/
support@BetterHotelBureau.org
Here’s the cruel irony: the industry already has more than enough tools—training systems, checklists, dashboards, SOP libraries, revenue tech—to make a GM’s job easier and performance stronger. But most managers are consumed by daily fires (complaints, call-offs, breakdowns), so they never get uninterrupted time to deploy those tools. The result is predictable: the hotel stays “busy,” but it never gets better.