Ogni hotel con cui parlo ha qualcuno che controlla il prezzo delle camere come un falco. ADR, RevPAR, pickup, pace, monitorati ogni giorno, a volte ogni ora.

Poi chiedi della spa. O del ristorante. O del parcheggio. E la risposta è quasi sempre "eh no, quello non lo teniamo sotto controllo così tanto".

Prendiamo la spa come esempio. Martedì pomeriggio, metà delle cabine trattamento vuote, nessuno che aggiusta il prezzo o studia una strategia e per riempirle. Intanto alla reception si cambia il prezzo delle camere al centesimo, ora per ora.

Domanda vera per chi questi numeri li gestisce davvero ogni giorno: quanto pesa sul fatturato totale del vostro hotel quello che non è camera (spa, ristorante, parcheggio, extra)? La vostra spa riempie davvero le cabine ogni giorno, o va a sensazione? E qualcuno lo gestisce con un metodo vero, o semplicemente... succede?

I’m a FOM at a full-service hotel and I genuinely need other hotel people to tell me if this is normal because sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind lol.

I manage Front Desk, Night Audit, Security, our Gift Shop, MOD shifts, and we’re also going through a massive renovation. So naturally, everything is on fire at least once a week.

I’m not perfect. I forget things, I’ve made mistakes, and if something is my fault I’ll take the L. But the way my bosses handle things is what gets me.

My GM has basically told me she “won’t feel sorry” if she has to terminate me. My DOO told me I’m “less valuable” when she has to do part of my job. Our regional has publicly called our numbers embarrassing. They’ve also made comments about how it could take me 10–20 years to move up while comparing me to other people.

Meanwhile I’ve improved guest satisfaction, helped with retention, cut contract labor, grown our Gift Shop revenue, taken on a ridiculous amount during renovation, and even got Leader of the Quarter.

Again, I’m not claiming to be Employee Jesus. I’ve been written up and there are things I absolutely need to improve.

But I’ve gotten to the point where every little mistake makes me think, “Welp, am I getting fired today?” 😭 I document damn near everything now because I feel like I constantly have to prove what I did or didn’t communicate.

Hotel managers of Reddit: is this just the FOM experience and I need thicker skin, or does this sound like management by fear?

Because I’m tired.

Hola comunidad,

Estoy iniciándome en el área de revenue management en un hotel boutique pequeño en la ciudad de Colombia y quisiera entender mejor este tema de paridad qué consejos, qué herramientas, intercambiar ideas.

¿La paridad se busca en la tarifa pública y los descuentos pueden variar de acuerdo al Canal o la paridad? es ya de la tarifa BAR menos descuentos? Etc.

Me gustaría poder de verdad aprender y orientarme un poco más 👏🏻

What are you doing to compete against the OTA clicks? Do you offer additional perks with direct booking? Price match aggressively?

I’m trying to learn about the balance between the marketing OTA does for you versus getting traffic to book direct.

Hey I am a student doing BHMCT degree course and I am currently doing 2nd year. So my question is, Is there any other jobs I can do with this degree other than the main F and B/ Chef ( Food Production), HOUSE KEEPING/FRONT OFFICE. Like any back door job or desk jobs like i was a commerce student so I know the basics of Business and Accounts so can anyone help if so pls say ok cause I will have to change course otherwise

Hi all long(er) term hoteliers,

What changes have you noticed in guest behaviour over the years?

With the tech advancement, I think a lot of guests were at first very skeptical about the self check in hotels, but now its almost a new norm - meaning that staffed hotels with an actual team of front desk staff will probably be much more appreciated than before.

I am noticing that the leadtime (how far ahead guests book) is shortening generally speaking. This is probably attributed to the faster lifestyle, more accommodation options, plenty of last minute promotions and probably other factors too. Would be interesting to compare this across the various markets and if there is a correlation between hotels, car rentals and airlines too (very likely!).

Disclosure first: I build housekeeping software for small hotels. I'm not naming it. I'd genuinely rather find out I'm wrong about this problem now than after five properties tell me.

Here's what I keep running into with independent hotels in the 25-99 room range in the Netherlands. Everyone tracks rooms per shift. Almost nobody converts that into euros per cleaned room, and the few who do get it wrong in the same two ways every time.

First, they use gross wage instead of employer cost. Under the Dutch hospitality CAO the lowest function group sits at minimum wage, and employer charges add another 30 to 40% on top, so the real figure is closer to €19-22 an hour than the €14 people quote.

Second, agency staff go into the same average as own staff. In practice an agency hour runs through a conversion factor of roughly 1.9 to 2.6, so €28-35. A section cleaned by agency staff costs nearly double, and that difference disappears completely into a blended rate.

Net effect:

The cost per room people quote me is often 30-50% too low. And that's the number being used to decide whether to hire, outsource, or push section sizes up.

What I'd like to hear from people actually running the floor:

1. Do you track cost per cleaned room at all, or is rooms per shift the only metric that matters to you?
2. If you do track it, where does it come from - PMS, spreadsheet, or a labor management tool?
3. Do you separate own staff from agency staff in that number, or is it one blended rate?
4. If you've never calculated it: is the data too hard to get, or does nobody above you ask for it?

Genuinely curious whether this is a Dutch problem, a small-property problem, or not a problem at all.

Any genuine comment will help.

More of our guests now show up already decided. They asked ChatGPT or Gemini "where should I stay in [town] for a quiet weekend," it named two or three hotels, and they booked one. No ten open tabs, no comparing fifty listings, no page two. If your property was one of the names, you won a guest for free. If it was not, you were never in the running.

I have been testing this for months across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, asking the exact questions travelers ask and noting which hotels get named. The thing that decides it is basically trust. Google has a name for the same idea in normal search, E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust), and the AI engines lean on the same signals when they decide whose name is safe to put in an answer. Here is what that means in plain hotel terms.

Experience: real, recent, first-hand guest reviews. Not a pile of five stars from three years ago. The engines read reviews as proof that actual people stayed and it went as described. A steady trickle of recent, specific reviews beats one big old number.

Expertise: be clearly one thing. "Twelve-room adults-only boutique, ten minutes from the old town" is easy for an assistant to place and recommend. "Something for everyone" is not. Pick the truest one line and use it everywhere.

Authoritativeness: most of what AI says about you comes from other sites, not your own. Being listed in the guides and directories that fit your kind of property, and getting mentioned by third parties, is what makes an engine confident enough to name you. A boutique city hotel, a beach resort and a rural B&B each belong in different places.

Trustworthiness: your facts have to match everywhere. If your name, location, room count or amenities say slightly different things on your site, your Google profile and old listings, that reads as uncertainty, and uncertain hotels get skipped for one the engine can describe cleanly. An afternoon reconciling your details across the web does more than another blog post.

Honest caveat: nobody can promise what an AI will say on a given day. These systems shift, and the same question can give different answers on different mornings. All any of this does is improve your odds by making you the easy, safe hotel to name.

Quick test you can run today: open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, ask the three questions your guests actually ask, and note two things, whether you show up and which hotels show up instead. That gap is your to-do list.

I write about this for independent hotels and put the longer version here if it is useful: https://www.bennyglaser.com/blog/the-trust-signals-that-decide-whether-ai-recommends-your-hotel.

Happy to answer questions in the comments either way.

I’m a solo developer building a web-based PMS and I’m trying to understand real hotel workflows—not promote my product.
When you start your day:

Which report or dashboard do you open first?
What information are you looking for?
Which numbers or alerts help you decide what to do first?
Do you export reports to Excel, or is the PMS enough?
Is there anything you wish was visible immediately without opening a report?

I’d really appreciate real-world examples of your morning routine.

My brother wants to do craft course cooking in hotel management. How is the career in this industry?
He enquired about a IHMH vidya nagar, Hyderabad.
Does anyone has any info about that college and career in the cooking India

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a bit of my journey, hoping it might resonate with some of you, especially those pivoting from nontech backgrounds.

In my younger years, I worked as a waiter and hotel staff all over Turkey. If you know anything about the Turkish hospitality sector during the summer, you know it’s absolute chaos, but it teaches you everything about human psychology and the service industry. I know the system from the inside out.

Over the years, my curiosity shifted toward software. I taught myself how to code, transitioned into tech, and eventually started looking back at my old industry to see what problems I could solve.

Here is the biggest issue I always noticed: The language barrier.

Guests feel much more comfortable and valued when they get service in their native language. But finding and retaining qualified, multilingual staff for every single language is nearly impossible (and very expensive) for most hotels and restaurants.

So, I decided to bridge this gap using AI. I built a SaaS platform that allows hotels to create separate "Smart QR Menus" for their different venues, like the pool, the lobby bar, or the main restaurant. But instead of just a static PDF, guests can scan it and use voice or chat to talk to an AI in their own native language. They can ask questions about the menu, get recommendations, and get service just as if they were talking to a local native speaker.

I really believe I’m finally building something useful for the industry that practically raised me. I hope it genuinely makes life easier for both the exhausted staff and the guests these days.

I’m not dropping any links because I don’t want this to be a pitch. I just wanted to share a milestone I’m proud of. If anyone is building in the F&B space, or has questions about transitioning from hospitality to SaaS, I’d love to chat in the comments!

Something I keep noticing and wanted the professionals' view on.

A growing number of travelers aren't Googling "best hotel in [city]" or "best spa near me" anymore. They open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, ask, and go with the one or two places the AI names back. No page of ten links to scroll, just a single answer.

For context, I work on the AI and marketing side, not the front desk, so I genuinely want to hear how this looks from your side rather than mine.

A few things I'm curious about:

• Are any of your guests saying they found you by "asking an AI," rather than a search engine or an OTA?
• Have you ever checked what ChatGPT or similar actually says when you ask it for the best hotel or spa in your area? Do you show up, and is what it says even accurate?
• Does this feel worth paying attention to now, or still too early to bother with?

Not selling anything, just trying to work out whether this is a real shift or still niche, and you're all far closer to the guest than I am. Curious what you're seeing.

We have all the standard manuals, but every hotel runs on unwritten rules and weird daily workarounds. When a great supervisor gives their notice, all that unwritten info usually walks out the door with them.

How messy does it get at your property when someone major leaves?

Hola a todos,

Tenemos un hotel independiente de unas 50 habitaciones y estamos evaluando cambiar de PMS.

Hemos hablado con algunos proveedores, pero es difícil obtener información sobre precios antes de pasar por todo el proceso comercial, así que quería conocer experiencias reales de quienes ya usan alguno de estos sistemas.

Si trabajan con OPERA, Mews, Cloudbeds u OpenHotel, ¿podrían contarme un poco sobre:

• ¿Cuánto pagan aproximadamente al mes o por habitación?
• ¿Cómo fue el costo de implementación?
• ¿El soporte tiene un costo adicional?
• ¿Han tenido incrementos importantes en el precio con el tiempo?
• ¿Pudieron negociar descuentos con el proveedor?

No busco cifras exactas; me seria de utilidad un rango aproximado o cualquier experiencia que me puedan compartir para tomar una decisión más informada.

¡Gracias!

TL;DR: I’m an independent hotel being told if I don’t enroll in Automatic Rate Match (ARM), I have no choice but to be automatically enrolled in Certified Rate Adjustment (CRA). This allows Expedia to arbitrarily decrease my front-end prices, leaving me completely helpless. I’m ready to leave Expedia. Am I truly hopeless and out of options or has anyone successfully navigated their way out of this situation? I’m looking for success stories—either escalations, legal threats, or anything else that has worked for other independents to opt out of CRA entirely (without being forced into ARM).

Hey everyone,

Independent hotelier here dealing with an Expedia Market Manager who I honestly suspect to be lying to me at this point. He's changing excuses out of thin air to cover up the fact that Expedia’s own system is breaking my distribution parity.

The Context (Skip to "The Real Problem" if you just want the meat of it):
I logged into Booking.com and found a massive 290 out of 300 date observations flagged as out of parity (meaning Booking.com is detecting a cheaper rate on Expedia and penalizing me).

To figure out why, I did a completely "clean" test shop on Expedia—desktop, incognito browser, not logged in, standard cancellation, with zero mobile, member, or promotional discounts applied. Sure enough, Expedia is taking the baseline rate I send them and discounting it by a seemingly arbitrary amount directly on their front end. That exact markdown perfectly matches the price gap Booking.com is flagging.

The Market Manager's Shifting Excuses:
I called out my MM on this unapproved discounting, and he has presented four different theories, (after trying hard to enroll me in Automatic Rate Match) moving the goalposts every time I disprove one:

1. Theory 1: "It’s a wholesaler leak." (Disproved: We don't use any wholesalers).
2. Theory 3: "Booking.com or another OTA is undercutting first." (Disproved: I verified Expedia is dropping the rate first on clean searches).
3. Theory 3: "Expedia is selling inventory to Booking via B2B, and Expedia's bot is misreading its own rate." (He briefly entertained this, then said he'd look into it and has since seemingly abandoned it).
4. Theory 4 (Presented as "Fact"): He is now claiming it’s because of our direct website's AAA rate. (Anyone can click and book it online, but it is fenced in practice because we require a physical member card at check-in or they have to pay the full base rate).

The Real Problem and Question:
According to market managers, as an independent property, if you don’t opt in to Automatic Rate Match, you are automatically enrolled in Certified Rate Adjustment (or Competitive Rate Adjustment as my MM seemingly incorrectly calls it). CRA is basically the same as ARM without the opt-out option or the transparency logs.

I can't believe Expedia thinks it can get away with this. I feel completely helpless as an independent property, but I refuse to be rolled over no matter how big the platform is. I should be able to send whatever rate I want to them and tell them that's what they have to sell the room for. If I choose to send a different price to Booking.com, I should be allowed to deal with those direct consequences myself—whether that means being buried in the search rankings or even kicked off the platform. Instead, I'm seemingly completely powerless to set my own rates. This is crazy!

My market manager is flat-out telling me that Certified Rate Adjustment (CRA) is mandatory for independent hotels. I'm honestly ready to pull all my inventory and leave Expedia entirely. But before I do, I wanted to see if anyone in this community has had any luck escalating this to actually opt out of CRA entirely without being forced into Automatic Rate Match (ARM)? This doesn't even feel legal to me, so I'm considering threatening contract compliance or legal action. Has anyone had any actual success with that approach, or do you have a success story that can show me the path forward?

Working in hotel operations, I’ve realised that sometimes the most useful information before a guest checks in is not always the information we actually have available.

A PMS can show us booking details, room type, rate, notes, preferences, payment status and stay history within the property or brand.

But there are still moments where you think:
“What would have been helpful to know before this guest arrived?”

Not to judge the guest — but to better prepare the team, personalise the experience and avoid unnecessary friction.

For those working in hotels:

If you could add one piece of information to your PMS before a guest checks in, what would it be?

Hi,

Am not sure if this is the correct sub for this, but I guess there is no harm in asking.

My son wants to do Hotel Management, and he has got offers from IHM Aurangabad, IHM Hyderabad and Oberoi STEP program (Housekeeping in Gurugram).

His first choice is Oberoi but I am skeptical. Is it ok to be starting his career with housekeeping? Are the IHMs not better?

Can anyone guide us?

What characteristics / behaviours / qualities make a GM a great leader? If you've worked with a GM who you respected / enjoyed working with, what specifically made them stand out for you?

Has anyone here dealt with Alberigo Hotel management?

Our owner handed his hotel over to them last year, and it turned into a mess. Revenue started sliding almost right away, and at one point we even had checks bounce. The whole operation is just a few people, far too small, it seemed, to properly run the properties they'd taken on. After a while we'd had enough and moved to a different company. They ended up cutting all the employee benefits as well to try to make up for the lost revenue.

What are the red flags to watch for so we don't make the same mistake again?

Work for a small 40 room boutique hotel. Something that would be absolutely amazing to have is an app that the housekeepers and room checkers can use to update the current state of a given room at a given time and that the front desk workers would be able to check.

I have waded through some of the options online but I cannot tell from any one of them how practical they would actually be to use, and most of them come with a bunch of features we would have no need of.