Quick note before we get into it: I'm hosting a live workshop tomorrow, October 1st at 1:00 PM EST on The Slow Season Pricing Playbook: How To Price With AirDNA Adapt. In just 90 minutes, we’ll show you how to build a competitive comp set and price strategically against your closest competitors. Click here to add this workshop to your calendar (and we’ll send you the replay - even if you can’t make it live). Last Thursday, I was catching up with a friend who’s attending VRMA 26 in Nashville...
about 3 hours ago • 3 min read
Hey, Ben here! This week Scott, Edwin, Zach and I spent the whole episode on one question. Who actually owns the guest? We talk about how the top players in hospitality are either fighting to capture more of your guests, or admitting they can't fake it anymore. Airbnb's hotel program just crossed 4,000 properties, growing 3x faster than Airbnb's core home business. Uber's playing the same game from a different angle. It's becoming a new booking layer for Expedia's hotel supply, using 50...
4 days ago • 1 min read
According to Lodging Econometrics, 2,371 new hotels opened in 2025. 2,617 more are expected in 2026. And most of those are going to do one thing right before they open their doors: list themselves on OTAs Which means… You'll be seeing a flood of competitors right next to your property, fighting for the same customers. And some of these hotels have bigger budgets and even institutional capital behind them. But that's not the worst part. It's this: OTAs will keep charging you the same...
6 days ago • 4 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: The one-page marketing report that tells you what to fix next (and takes ten minutes a month, not a weekend). A quick promo before we start... FREE WORKSHOP How Glamping Resorts Can Drive Millions Of Ideal Guests To Their Direct Booking Site (Without Spending Hours On Video Shoots & Edits) This Thursday, September 3, Brian Linton and I are running a live workshop on the single-shot Reel, the format we lean on when we need volume without booking a shoot day. You'll...
28 days ago • 4 min read
FREE WORKSHOP How Glamping Resorts Can Drive Millions Of Ideal Guests To Their Direct Booking Site (Without Spending Hours On Video Shoots & Edits) Thursday, September 3, Brian Linton and I are running a live workshop on the single-shot Reel, which is the format we use when we want to record, edit, and push a new Reel live in minutes.. You'll leave with a hook, a caption and a 7 to 12 second video brief for your next Reel, built with us on the call. 1:00 PM ET, on Zoom, free. Save your seat...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: How to find the bookings you lost at checkout (and the choke points you'll catch only by going through it yourself). When we launched the booking engine at Onera Wimberley, we had a problem. The page showed guests a price with a long string of decimals trailing off the end of it. The problem is, nobody will enter a card number on a page that doesn't tell them what it costs. The dropoff from that page wasn’t flagged in a report. A guest didn’t write in about it. We...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: How to test reels on completely cold audiences before anything touches your main grid (and the two numbers that keep you posting). I often hear you guys say that the hard part of content isn't the footage. You've got the clip: a hot tub looking out at the mountains with the sunrise coming up behind it. Then you sit there and your brain goes blank on what to text to put across it. I feel you. Finding the words is the easy half. The blank page happens because each...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: How a viral post shrinks your booking window (and the real-time pricing move that turns the surge into ADR.) You post a reel. It takes off. The views climb, the saves stack up, and it feels like the marketing finally worked. Most of us screenshot it, drop it in the team chat, and get back to the day. Here's what that reaction misses. A viral post does something to your calendar before it ever shows up in your revenue. One reel at one of our properties pulled 1.7M...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: The anatomy of an Instagram carousel that gets swiped all the way to your booking link (and the one slide that does most of the work). I often hear you guys say carousels feel like busywork. You spend an afternoon in Canva, post a tidy set of slides, and it lands with a couple hundred views and zero bookings. So you quietly decide carousels don't work for hotels. Here's the thing. The carousel probably wasn't the problem. The way it was built was. A carousel isn't...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: How to create content that books rooms (even when nobody comes to your town) I often hear you guys tell me the same thing about content: my town isn't a destination. Nobody's heard of it. Nobody's booking a trip to see it. They come for the quiet, the view, a few days off the grid, and then they go home. So when you sit down to post, it feels like there's nothing to say. Onera Wimberley sits in a Hill Country town most people outside Texas have never heard of. But...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read