USALI at 100: How a Century-Old Standard Keeps Evolving with Hospitality

The USALI 12th Revised Edition is easy to read as a change log. Read as an act of stewardship, it is one of the quiet achievements of our profession — and, seen in practice, a resource with more to offer the newer lodging segments, including vacation rental, than most of us assume.

In 1926, the Hotel Association of New York City published the first Uniform System of Accounts for Hotels. It was one of the earliest successful attempts, in any industry, to give an entire sector a common way of keeping score. The committee that produced it went on to become the founding chapter of what we now know as HFTP. A century later, the standard they started is still in use, still being refined, and still doing the same essential job. That is a remarkable thing, and it is worth pausing on before we rush to the change log.

The current 12th Revised Edition, produced by the joint HFTP/AHLA Global Finance Committee, is the first created under HFTP's full ownership of the copyright. It would have been easy for a revision like this to be either timid or disruptive. It is neither. What the committee delivered is a careful modernization — the standard brought into step with how lodging is actually distributed, staffed, financed, and consumed today, without sacrificing the continuity that gives the standard its value in the first place. As a CHAE and a member of HFTP, I think that balance deserves more appreciation than a bullet list of account changes usually conveys.

Stewardship, made concrete

Look at what the revision chose to make visible, and a philosophy comes into view. Utilities became Energy, Water, and Waste — a new schedule with its own subcategories and consumption metrics. On the surface a renaming; underneath, a decision that sustainability belongs in the operating statement rather than in a separate sustainability report nobody reconciles to the P&L. The standard is meeting the industry where it is heading.

The Rooms schedule gained a shared vocabulary for distribution — channel-mix definitions spanning brand direct, GDS, OTA, property direct, voice, and wholesale connections. Anyone who has watched two identical properties post different margins on identical occupancy knows that distribution is now where hotel economics are won or lost. By naming those channels consistently, the 12th Edition makes that reality comparable across properties for the first time. That is exactly what a uniform system is for.

A new schedule details full-time-equivalent employees by department, giving labor — every operator's largest controllable cost — a standardized footing. Another provides disclosure of the costs a brand or operator requires: mandatory programs, systems, and services. That second schedule is, quietly, an act of service to owners, creating a place to see spend that was previously diffuse. And the revision brought the accounting itself current — right-of-use assets and lease liabilities reflecting the modern treatment of leases, a dedicated line for loyalty program member benefits, recognition of key money as the long-term liability it has become, and digital marketing finally appearing where marketing spend belongs.

There is even an entirely new section for all-inclusive properties — summary statements, schedules, and metrics for a model earlier editions did not formally address. That inclusiveness is telling. A standard that adds a home for a model it previously left out is a standard that intends to keep serving the whole industry, not just its most conventional members.

What the 12th Edition offers vacation rental operators

I manage a portfolio of short-term rental properties, a segment often treated as living outside the hotel world entirely. So let me say plainly what the 12th Edition looks like from where I sit: it is more useful to us than the "USALI is for hotels" reflex suggests. The revision is quietly full of tools a vacation rental operator should adopt.

The channel-mix vocabulary is the clearest example. Distribution economics — the cost difference between a direct booking and an OTA booking — are, if anything, more decisive in short-term rental than in hotels. Having a standardized way to name and compare channel performance is directly valuable to us. So is the Energy, Water, and Waste discipline: sustainability reporting is coming for every lodging segment, and a portfolio of individual homes has consumption to track just as a hotel does. The full-time-equivalent labor schedule speaks to our largest controllable cost, and the guidance on distinguishing operated departments from minor ones maps neatly onto the amenity-and-service decisions vacation rental managers make every day.

Most encouraging of all, the 12th Edition explicitly enhanced its guidance for mixed-ownership lodging facilities and updated its treatment of mixed-use properties. That matters, because it shows the standard is already reaching, deliberately, toward the ownership structures that define the fastest-growing parts of lodging — including ours. The uniform-system tradition is not a closed hotel club. It is a discipline extending itself, edition by edition, toward the full breadth of how people are housed when they travel. Vacation rental operators who assume the standard has nothing to say to them are leaving real tools on the table.

Why the discipline matters more than any line item

It would be a mistake to treat these changes as the point. The point is the practice they represent. What makes the USALI valuable is not that Energy, Water, and Waste is the right label, or that the channel-mix categories are perfectly drawn. It is that an entire industry has agreed, for a hundred years, to keep its books in a shared language and to revise that language deliberately as the business changes. Comparability — the ability to measure one property against another and have the comparison mean something — is not a natural state. It is maintained. It is the product of committees doing unglamorous work so that lenders, owners, asset managers, and operators can all read the same statement and trust it.

That maintenance is a community act, and it is one of the best arguments for belonging to a professional body like HFTP. The standard does not update itself. It is kept current by practitioners who volunteer their expertise — and the 12th Edition is what that stewardship looks like when it is done well. When I earned the CHAE and worked through the 12th Edition material, what struck me was not only the technical content but the accumulated judgment behind it: decades of professionals deciding, carefully, what deserves its own line and what does not.

An invitation to engage

For practitioners, the takeaway is simple and, I think, optimistic. Engage with the revision. Adopt the parts that fit your operation — and the standard explicitly invites you to adapt, deleting schedules that do not apply and building subaccounts where you need more detail, so long as they roll up into the defined structure that keeps everyone comparable. Learn the channel-mix vocabulary even if you run a limited-service property; adopt the Energy, Water, and Waste discipline even if sustainability reporting is not yet required of you. The revision rewards the operator who treats it as a resource rather than a rulebook.

And for those with the time and the inclination, there is a further step: contribute. A living standard needs its community. The USALI is at its best when the people who use it — across every segment of lodging — bring their practice back to the table so the next revision reflects the industry as it actually is. That is how a document written in 1926 is still the right tool in 2026. Not because it never changed, but because the people who care about it never stopped tending it.

A hundred years is a long time for any instrument to stay useful. The USALI has managed it not through permanence but through stewardship — and the 12th Revised Edition is a fine example of the craft. It is worth studying, worth adopting, and worth supporting. Standards like this are the quiet infrastructure of a professional industry, and we are fortunate to have one that so many people have worked so hard, for so long, to keep alive.