20 Years Running Hotels: What the Industry Gets Wrong

I started in hospitality the way most people do — at the bottom, learning the hard way that the gap between a hotel's written standards and what actually happens on the floor is vast, fascinating, and often the real source of everything that goes wrong.

Twenty years later, after properties across Chile, France, Vietnam, and the US, I still find the same gap. The difference is I've learned to read it faster.

Here's what I think the industry consistently gets wrong.

We Promote the Wrong People

The best room attendant becomes the floor supervisor. The best waiter becomes the restaurant manager. The best front desk agent becomes the front office manager. This feels logical — reward excellence, build loyalty, retain talent.

The problem is that technical excellence and people leadership are different skills. Often they're inversely correlated. The person who is extraordinarily good at their craft has usually internalized a very precise way of doing things. That precision makes them exceptional individually. It makes them impatient with people who learn differently, work at a different pace, or make the mistakes that beginners make.

I've seen this pattern produce some of the most talented and most miserable middle managers in the industry. They were promoted into roles they weren't equipped for, given no real management training, and held accountable for team results while still being expected to maintain their technical performance.

The fix is not complicated but requires something hotels rarely do: define management competencies separately from technical competencies, and promote and train for both.

We Measure the Wrong Things

OCC, ADR, RevPAR. Guest satisfaction scores. Online review ratings. These are the standard metrics of hotel performance, and they matter. But they measure outcomes, not causes.

A property with good scores might be running on a team that is six months from collective burnout. A property with declining scores might have a completely fixable operational issue that nobody has had time to diagnose because everyone is managing the consequences of the previous week's firefighting.

The metrics I find most diagnostic are the ones that require actually being present to collect: how long does a handover briefing actually take, and how much of the critical information gets transmitted? What percentage of maintenance issues are reported at discovery versus after they've affected a guest? How often are supervisors making decisions within their authority versus escalating upward because they're not sure what they're allowed to do?

These numbers aren't in the dashboard. They live on the floor.

The Chile Earthquake and What It Taught Me

In February 2010, I was Deputy General Manager at the Westin San Francisco in Santiago when the 8.8 earthquake hit at 3:34am. We had 350 guests, significant structural concerns, and no external support available for hours.

The decision-making that night happened at every level — from the front desk team managing panicked guests, to maintenance assessing structural safety with inadequate information, to me coordinating with a GM who was unreachable for the first forty minutes.

What worked was not the emergency plan. The plan was outdated and didn't map to what was actually happening. What worked was that the team knew who made which decisions, they trusted each other's judgments within their domain, and they communicated using the simplest possible protocols — person to person, floor by floor.

What I learned: resilient operations are built on clarity about decision rights and trust in people to use them. You cannot build that clarity during a crisis. It has to already exist.

Every operation I've worked in since, I've prioritized that clarity above almost everything else. Not because earthquakes are common. Because operational crises — the smaller ones, the daily ones — require exactly the same thing.

Vietnam and the Limits of Standard Operating Procedures

In 2018, I led a joint venture project at a property in Vietnam. The property had excellent SOPs — detailed, well-documented, regularly updated. The service was inconsistent.

The gap was cultural. The SOPs were written by European managers for European guest expectations. The team executing them was Vietnamese, serving an increasingly Asian guest mix. The mismatch wasn't incompetence. It was a system designed for a different context.

The SOPs that worked were the ones we rebuilt together with the team, capturing their knowledge of local guest expectations alongside the international standards the property needed to maintain. The team members who had been quietly adapting procedures for years because they knew something the SOPs didn't — they became the architects of the new standards.

This was humbling. It was also the most effective operational improvement I've been part of.

What I Actually Think Is Worth Fixing

After twenty years, here's where I think the biggest leverage is in hotel operations:

Supervisor capability is the single most underinvested area in the industry. The manager who runs the floor during service, who handles the complaint at 11pm, who makes the call when a VIP's preferences conflict with house policy — this person determines the guest experience more than any other single factor. Most properties invest almost nothing in their development.

Handover systems are where the most operational value is lost. Every shift change is an information transfer. Most hotels do this badly. A 20-minute investment in a real handover protocol recovers hours of lost service recovery per week.

Decision rights clarity is the cheapest high-leverage intervention I know. If every supervisor knows exactly which decisions they can make without escalation, the quality of those decisions goes up and the burden on managers goes down. Writing this document takes half a day.

None of these require technology. None of them require consultants. They require time, attention, and the willingness to treat the people running the operation as the primary asset they are.

That's what twenty years taught me. Most of the value is already in the building. The work is finding it.