With U.S. hotel margins compressing for a third consecutive year, the article argues supplier payments represent an untapped profit center via rebates, working capital gains, and AP automation.
STR raised its 2026 U.S. RevPAR forecast to 4.4% growth, and this piece explains how hoteliers should translate national trends into property-level 2027 budgets by aligning financial and demand forecasts.
A detailed framework for managing hotel opening budgets, covering stabilization timelines of 36-48 months, comp set forecasting, pricing tactics, KPI tracking, and common financial mistakes to avoid.
A free webinar offering hoteliers a step-by-step budgeting framework to build, understand, and defend hotel budgets to ownership and corporate stakeholders.
A hotel finance coach outlines three habits for building a defensible hotel budget: zero-based construction, driver-based forecasting, and presenting it as a personal commitment to ownership.
The USALI 12th Revised Edition modernizes hotel accounting standards with new schedules for energy/waste, labor, and channel distribution, and offers practical tools for vacation rental operators too.
Argues that Excel-based revenue workflows create costly decision delays across hotel portfolios, and outlines what an effective RMS should deliver in terms of explainability, consolidation, and total cost of ownership.
HVS founder Steve Rushmore explains why the debt coverage ratio method produces a more defensible hotel valuation than the loan-to-value approach, with worked examples showing how lender inputs drive value and loan sizing.
Hotels should continue reducing unnecessary rate leakage because it protects pricing integrity, strengthens partner relationships and improves profitability. But pursuing absolute zero leakage is increasingly unrealistic in a fragmented global distribution ecosystem.
Zero rate leakage is a bit of a fantasy: a room that never appears cheaper elsewhere.Distribution is a network. A room moves from hotel to wholesaler to bedbank to affiliate to OTA, and every layer that is added also removes visibility.
Asking whether hoteliers should stop chasing rate leakage suggests accepting contract breaches as a routine cost of doing business. The issue isn't technological complexity or API caching—it is a direct breach of written commercial agreements.Historically, wholesale rates resided in printed brochures as opaque, bundled packages—a volume trade-off generating incremental demand without exposing room pricing.What changed?
Driftwood Capital's white paper argues hotel credit is materially distinct from corporate direct lending, citing a 0.18 correlation, lower CRE charge-off rates, and 76% on-time CMBS loan repayment through 2020-2025.
The author argues that USALI should be extended, not abandoned, to cover the owner-operator cost split unique to vacation rental management, preserving comparability across the sector.
The article argues that manual reporting workflows create costly decision lag for hotel revenue teams, and proposes auditing time-to-action across signal, decision, and execution timestamps.
Newport Hospitality Group details how it uses STR Custom Forecasts and CoStar analytics to build hotel budgets with segment-level comparisons, mix modeling, and year-over-year commentary in a single platform.
A hospitality consultant argues that most hotels lose ancillary revenue not from product gaps, but from poor language framing, mistimed offerings, and invisible services that prevent willing guests from spending.
A vacation rental operator argues the industry lacks a unified financial standard, proposing an "Owner-Adjusted Performance Report" that consolidates both management company and property owner costs into a single net return view.
The final installment of an 8-part series argues that RevPAR is a vanity metric, urging hoteliers to measure profit kept after acquisition costs and total guest spend instead.
Visa Destinations is an interesting development, but it's too early to call it a major shift in hotel distribution. Visa has huge global reach through its billions of payment cards, giving it the potential to become a significant travel booking platform.
I wrote some time back about the emergence of banking as a genuine alternative to traditional distribution and their depth of customer intelligence as compared to other business types competing for the same customer.It’s a mistake to look at this strictly through the lens of Visa's direct customer relationships or draw parallels to Amazon's travel missteps.
Visa's 4.3 billion cards in circulation miss something AMEX has: an aspirational brand cardholders actively choose because of what it says about them.That distinction matters more than scale here. Amex built travel credibility over decades with their concierge desks, Centurion Lounges, curated hotel collections...
Using the England vs. Argentina narrative as a lens, the piece argues hoteliers must price from live booking data and pickup curves, not gut feel, reputation, or the story a date seems to tell.
Using sports betting market logic, the author argues hotels lose revenue on peak nights by leaving discounts active, ignoring LOS controls, or allowing parity gaps when demand guarantees full occupancy.
The article argues summer revenue leakage stems from slow decision workflows, not unpredictable demand, and outlines a phased shift from static reporting to live, bounded automation.