Modern Hospitality Playbook: How to price a brand-new property with zero booking history, and read the market's ceiling before you take a single reservation. The last two pricing plays had a catch. Both of them required that you had a booking history. The autopsy needed your last 12 months. The Pink Line needed your real spread between booked and empty nights. So a few of you wrote back with the obvious question. What do I do when the property is brand new and there's no history to pull?...
5 days ago • 4 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: How to run a panic pricing autopsy on your last season and find the money you already earned but never collected. Most pricing mistakes don't feel like mistakes. They feel like being careful. You watch the calendar fill slower than last year. You feel the pressure build. So you shave $20 off to get the booking, and tell yourself you'll hold the line next time. Or you do the opposite. You pick a rate that feels fair, set it once, and never touch it again all...
8 days ago • 3 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: The three-layer funnel that tells you exactly where your demand engine is leaking (and what to fix first.) I hear from hospitality operators all the time who are posting consistently, getting decent impressions, and still watching OTA commissions eat their margin. Their first instinct is to fix the content. Often that’s the right instinct. Nine times out of ten, the content is part of the problem. But there’s a second problem hiding underneath it: they have no...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: The two content types every operator should know, and how to tell which one your property actually needs. I hear some version of this whenever I talk to operators: “I’ve been posting consistently. I get some views. But I can’t connect any of it to actual bookings.” It’s one of the most common places operators get stuck. And usually, the problem isn’t what they’re posting or how often. It’s that they picked a content type without asking the one question that...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: The three-part system that got us there. We wrapped the first live session of the Modern Hospitality Accelerator last week. 45 operators in the room. Boutique hotels, glamping resorts, cabin portfolios, group-buyout estates, pre-launch builds. Different markets and stages. Every surface problem looked different. After two hours, one thing was impossible to miss. Every operator had built the hard part. The property, the design, the operations, the guest experience....
18 days ago • 3 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: The direct booking channel sitting in your PMS that most operators have never turned on. Before you read any further, I want you to do one thing. Open your PMS. Pull your total guest contacts. Past guests, inquiry leads, website signups. Everyone who’s ever raised their hand about your property. Write down that number. Now ask yourself: when’s the last time you emailed them? For most operators, the answer is never. They have the list. They’ve never touched it. THE...
22 days ago • 2 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: Why the operators who build the best properties still lose to the OTAs, and what they're finally doing about it. My team and I spent the last week onboarding the first cohort of the Modern Hospitality Accelerator. Here’s a sample of who was in the room: A former corporate executive who sold his dream home to buy a farm property from scratch A multi-property developer managing investor returns across a growing portfolio A brand-side marketing director overseeing...
25 days ago • 2 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: The comparison most operators make when they think about direct bookings. It's the wrong one. I hear some version of this every week: “I know direct bookings are the play. I just don’t have time to do all that marketing.” The operators who say this aren’t wrong about their situation. They’re running the right math on the wrong comparison. THE WRONG WAY Most operators think they have two options: Do the marketing myself, or let OTAs handle it. If that’s the...
29 days ago • 2 min read
Modern Hospitality Playbook: Why revenue management matters just as much at a single-key property than it does at a 30-room hotel. An operator asked me this week whether revenue management was even worth it if they only have one key. I kept thinking about Lazy River when they asked. Nine bedrooms. Its own lazy river in the backyard. (The kind of property where a video of six people launching off a water slide at the same time hits two million views on Instagram.) Groups of 20, 40, sometimes...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
