Q&A: Be honest, would anyone miss your hotel extras?

You’ve said that “Great hospitality and great financial performance should never be mutually exclusive.” What’s something hotels spend money on that they probably shouldn’t—and what would you do with those resources instead?

Hotels spend a lot of money on things guests simply don’t care about. Sometimes hoteliers overcomplicate hospitality. Some invest in programs, amenities, technology or even design elements because they think they are supposed to have them, not because they actually improve the guest experience or generate a return. I would rather take some of those dollars and put them into the people delivering the experience. Better training, better leadership, better tools and most importantly, creating a people-centered culture.

I would also invest more in the moments guests actually remember. A genuine welcome, a great bed, fantastic coffee in the morning, a bartender who remembers your name, a restaurant that locals actually want to visit. Those things may not always look impressive on a capital expenditure spreadsheet, but they create loyalty. For me, the question is always: Will the guest notice it, feel it or pay for it? If the answer is no to all three, we should probably challenge why we are spending money on it.

Where do you see the biggest disconnect between what hotels think guests want and what actually creates a better guest experience?

I think hotels sometimes confuse more with better. More amenities, more technology, more programming, more touchpoints. But I don’t believe guests necessarily want more. They want things to work, and they want the experience to feel effortless and genuine. They want a clean room. They want a comfortable bed. They want great water pressure. They want the Wi-Fi to work. They want someone to answer the phone. And when they interact with a person, they want that interaction to feel sincere rather than scripted.

Particularly in independent hotels, guests are also looking for a sense of place. They don't want to feel like they could wake up in Charleston, Memphis, Athens or Asheville and have exactly the same experience. Technology can make hospitality easier, but it shouldn't become the hospitality. The emotional connection still comes from people, from the restaurant, from music, from design, from the neighborhood and from those little unexpected hospitality moments that make someone feel genuinely taken care of.

If a hotel is performing well financially but guest feedback—or your team on the ground—tells you something feels off, how do you reconcile those two realities?

A strong P&L can tell you what happened yesterday. Your guests and your people are often telling you what is going to happen tomorrow. You can have a very profitable hotel for a period of time while slowly damaging the experience. Maybe you’re understaffed, maybe maintenance is being deferred, maybe the restaurant has lost some of its energy, maybe your team is exhausted. None of those things necessarily show up immediately in your monthly financial package. But eventually, they will.

I believe you have to manage both the numbers and the pulse of the property. Walk the hotel, sit in the lobby, have a drink at the bar, talk to the housekeepers, read the reviews, speak with guests. You learn things walking a hotel that you will never learn from a spreadsheet. Financial performance is incredibly important, as we are responsible for somebody else's investment. But sustainable financial performance comes from protecting the culture and experience that created the demand in the first place.

Is there ever a point where pursuing operational efficiency starts to erode the very thing guests are paying for—and how do you know when you’ve crossed that line?

Absolutely. There is a difference between eliminating waste and eliminating hospitality. I’m a big believer in operational discipline. We watch labor, productivity, purchasing, food cost and every other major expense very closely. But efficiency cannot simply mean fewer people or spending less money. 

The question is: What are we making more efficient? If I can use technology to remove administrative work from the front desk so that person has more time to engage with a guest, that's great efficiency. If I change a process in housekeeping and give the team more time to focus on cleanliness and room presentation, that's great efficiency. But if our cost-cutting means nobody is there to greet the guest, the bar feels empty, the room isn't maintained properly or our people are so stretched that hospitality becomes transactional, we have crossed the line.

Our goal is never to operate the cheapest hotel possible; the goal is to operate the most profitable version of the experience we promised the guest. That's a very different mindset.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Independent hotels have an incredible opportunity right now because people are craving experiences that feel unique. But independence by itself isn’t a strategy for success; you still have to be disciplined, you have to understand revenue management, labor, distribution, purchasing, marketing and profitability just as well, if not better than the large brands. What you don’t want to do is allow all of that discipline to remove the soul from the hotel.

That’s something we think about constantly at The Indigo Road. We want creativity, personality and a genuine connection to the community, but we also expect the hotel and its restaurants to be financially successful businesses. For us, those two things are intimately aligned, as success is an inevitable result of our culture as an operating model with an emphasis on profitability. I don't think those ideas compete with each other.