Optimism Is Back. Now Operators Want Their Tech to Deliver

By Charlie Fritsch, CEO

Optimism is back. 2026 performance continues to beat expectations and 2027 forecasts call for positive RevPAR growth. But the hoteliers I talked to in Phoenix aren’t counting on revenue growth to save their margins. At the 31st Lodging Conference in Phoenix earlier this month, the mood was noticeably better than a year ago. HVS called […]

Read More

The Growth Tax on Hotel Finance Teams

By Charlie Fritsch, CEO

When your ERP or accounting system doesn’t speak hospitality every new contract, owner, and brand adds more work for your finance team. Today, hotel management companies are coming to the table with more sophisticated requirements than they were even a few years ago. I see it in the RFPs we’re receiving. They’re longer, more specific, […]

Read More

Why Hotel Management Companies Fall Behind on AR — And How to Fix It

By Chip Fritsch, COO

There are plenty of problems you expect to encounter as your hotel management company grows. Falling months behind on billing your own hotels probably isn’t one of them. Yet, at last year’s Lodging Conference, I heard many versions of this exact same problem. Hotel management companies had successfully grown their portfolios and wanted to keep […]

Read More

The Hotel Back Office Is Becoming Real-Time: Two Operators Prove It’s Already Happening

By Chip Fritsch, COO

Operators have wanted a near-real-time P&L for years. Now, companies that have the right financial foundation in place are proving how close you can actually get. In Dallas, a regional director of operations overseeing 10 properties has worked hard to build an operational cadence that lets GMs meet a 10:30 AM daily deadline to clear […]

Read More

Rates Up, Reviews Up, Margins Flat: What I Actually Heard at Hotel Data Conference 2026

By Chris Hall, CRO

At this year’s Hotel Data Conference everyone wanted to talk about AI; but almost nobody wanted to talk about the same AI. Sit down with an operator in the hallway and the conversation was about margin discipline and managing rising undistributed expenses. Sit in a main-stage session and it was all about channels and booking.  […]

Read More

9 KPIs Every Hotel Management Company Should Be Tracking

By Charlie Fritsch, CEO

One of the things I’ve learned from evaluating hotel portfolios over the years is that similar operating results don’t always translate into similar financial performance. Two management companies can report nearly identical occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR while producing very different profit margins and long-term value. The difference usually isn’t found in traditional performance metrics. It’s […]

Read More

Native vs Third-Party AI: Why Two AI Solutions Can Give You Very Different Answers

By Jaime Goss, VP

Hotel finance teams are relying on two types of third-party AI — one from a vendor, one they built themselves — and both can fail for the same underlying reason. There’s a pattern playing out in hotel accounting departments right now. A controller finishes the monthly close, exports the P&L to a spreadsheet, and uploads […]

Read More

More AI, More Control: What Hotel GMs Should Expect From Automation

By Charlie Fritsch, CEO

The hospitality industry is undergoing massive changes in the age of AI. With the majority of hotel companies either already deploying AI or planning to do so, there’s a healthy mixture of excitement and concern, particularly for many GMs.  The tools they’ve wanted to help them do their jobs more efficiently are already being employed, […]

Read More

Beyond Month-End: Unlocking The Strategic Potential Of Your GM Critique

By Jaime Goss, VP

As we get deeper into the age of AI, many hotel leaders are beginning to reevaluate their reporting structures. And while much of the conversation has focused on dashboards, analytics, and automation, the GM Critique has quietly become one of the most frequently requested reporting improvements among corporate and property users.  Few reports hold more […]

Read More

AI-Driven BI Is Finally Giving Hotel Reporting Context

By Jaime Goss, VP

One of the major focuses for hoteliers this past decade has been to get more visibility across their portfolios. And in many ways, they succeeded. Regional VPs can open a portfolio dashboard and instantly see occupancy declines, labor variances, softer pace, or unexpected shifts in GOP. But just because they can see what happened doesn’t […]

Read More

Why Back Office Fundamentals Still Matter in the Age of AI

By Chip Fritsch, COO

There’s a pattern I’ve started to notice with my recent conversations with hotel finance teams. Many know they have to address the fragmented systems that are causing delays, but they’re taking more of a “wait and see” approach instead of making fundamental changes to consolidate the data. Why? Because AI is evolving really quickly right […]

Read More

How AP Automation Turns Invoice Processing Into Negotiation Leverage

By Elisa Fritsch, VP

Cost control is top of mind for most hotel finance teams at the moment. Controllers might suspect that they might be overpaying somewhere, but if something really was off, they’d be able to see it, right? That was exactly the thinking of one VP of Finance who managed a 25-property hotel group. Because workflows were […]

Read More

Fresh Features: HIA’s Q1 2026 Software Enhancements

By Elisa Fritsch, VP

Q1 2026 brought a strong slate of new capabilities to the HIA platform — all built to make your team’s day-to-day work faster, more accurate, and easier to manage. This quarter’s highlights include a brand new daily report monitor dashboard that puts monitoring and troubleshooting in your hands, enriched PMS integrations for HotelKey and Stay […]

Read More

Labor Is Your Biggest Cost Line: Here’s How To Actually See It

By Jaime Goss, VP

Labor continues to be one of the largest cost lines in most hotels (typically 30–35% of revenue). It’s also one of the hardest to see while it’s actually happening. You can run a full week thinking everything is on track. Occupancy held. The front desk wasn’t overwhelmed. Housekeeping felt like it kept up. Nothing really […]

Read More

2026 Will Reward the Prepared: Are Your Financials Deal-Ready?

By Charlie Fritsch, CEO

2026 will not be the easiest transaction environment I’ve seen over the last 30 years, but it may be the most strategic. Owners who’ve been in a holding pattern through 2024 and 2025 will likely see better entry points as financing conditions improve and a wave of maturities force decisions. With debt markets loosening and […]

Read More

The End of Data Silos: How a Unified ERP Empowers Hospitality Management Companies

By Chip Fritsch, COO

Over the past decade, hospitality tech stacks have exploded, with more apps and services promising better visibility and deeper insights to make reporting easier and let decisions happen faster. And in many ways, they delivered. Teams now have access to more data than ever before.  But as many hoteliers have had time to sit with […]

Read More

Industry Outlook: 2026 Will Be Won On Margin Defense

By Jaime Goss, VP

Takeaways from ALIS 2026 Americas Lodging Investment Summit (ALIS) 2026 didn’t signal the start of a rebound. It signaled a shift in management strategy – and what will be necessary to win this year Hoteliers are coming into 2026 with more realism than optimism. RevPAR ended last year down 0.3%, and the 2026 growth projections […]

Read More

HIA’s Top Software Enhancements 2025

By Elisa Fritsch, VP

“HIA is driven to build the best solution for our hospitality clients. We want to be the system that solves pain points, that allows you to do more with your team, to take them out of manual data entry and put them on a higher tier of operations. We are never going to be done […]

Read More