There are four things I would focus on. In that order.
1/ Revenue Discipline Comes Before Everything Else
The first thing I look at is whether the hotel is actually getting the rate it should be getting.
I call this revenue discipline, and it starts with the best available rate. That is the non-discounted rate the hotel wants to sell. The question is how many guests are paying it versus how many are getting some kind of discount they may not have even needed.
From there, I look at what I call rate fences. These are rules that govern who gets a discounted rate and under what conditions. If a corporate account has negotiated $159 per night, that rate belongs to that company’s travelers, not to anyone who asks for it at the front desk. Rate fences keep discounted business in its lane.
The third piece of revenue discipline is length of stay management, and this one is often overlooked. If I know that Thursday through Sunday will be at high demand, the last thing I want is a guest checking in Thursday for a single night. I want four nights minimum. So I set a four-night minimum on Thursday, three nights on Friday, two on Saturday. I can also set maximums. If someone wants to check in Wednesday for two nights and leave Friday, I have to decide if that business helps or hurts me when I know Thursday is going to be full at a much higher rate.
Minimums and maximums together let you shape the business you take. Most hotels do not use them aggressively enough.
2/ Stop Paying Commissions You Don’t Have to Pay
The second lever is direct bookings, and the math here is straightforward.
A typical OTA commission runs fifteen to twenty percent. A direct booking through your own website or by phone costs you nothing beyond whatever you are already spending on those channels. If the demand exists, why pay a commission to capture it?
For a 30-day push, I would run a rate available exclusively to guests who call the hotel directly or book on the hotel’s own website. Not on any OTA. Not on any third-party aggregator. Direct only. The rate can include something that makes it feel special: breakfast, early check-in, a room upgrade. Something that gives the guest a reason to go direct and gives the hotel a reason to offer a rate that technically differs from what is on the OTAs without violating rate parity agreements.
Over 30 days, even a modest shift in direct booking mix has a real impact on net revenue. Not gross revenue. Net revenue, because you are keeping more of what you earn. This is key for your hotel profitability strategy.
3/ Labor Is Where Most Hotels Leak the Most Money
The single largest cost in any hotel is labor. That is where I look third, and I look hard.
The first question is whether employees are engaged during their shift or whether there are stretches of idle time that are costing the hotel money. Poor scheduling is one of the most common and most correctable problems I see. You do not schedule eight housekeepers to clean what four can handle. You do not put two people on the front desk during a stretch of low arrivals when a manager could cover.
Beyond scheduling, there is redeployment. This is where I ask whether employees are spending their time on the highest-value activity they could be doing. A general manager sitting in an office responding to guest reviews, one by one, is a general manager not walking the property and engaging with guests. AI can draft those responses. The GM glances at it, approves it, done. That is not cutting corners. That is putting the GM where they create the most value.
When AI or some automation can substitute for a guest-facing opportunity, absolutely I do that.
The same logic applies to room deliveries. As I have said before, “When AI or some automation can substitute for a guest-facing opportunity, absolutely I do that.” If I can send a robot to deliver a bottle of water or extra towels, I want that employee free to have a real conversation with a guest in the lobby. We now run three hotels where robots handle routine deliveries, and in every case it has improved the employee’s job, not eliminated it. For a closer look at how that works in practice, see The Real ROI of Hotel Robots.
4/ The Budget Discipline That Most GMs Skip
The fourth lever sounds simple, but it is one of the most effective tools I use: department budgets with teeth.
Every department head gets a budget for the month. They know exactly how much they can spend, down to the dollar. They cannot exceed that number without explicit approval from the general manager. The general manager’s job is to ask one question before approving anything above budget: is this an emergency, or can we live without it?
Most of the time, they can live without it.
Owners do not like missed budgets. They especially do not like overruns caused by department heads who simply were not paying attention. A department head who knows their limit and manages to it is doing their job. A department head who blows through their budget without a conversation with the GM is not.
I have seen hotels where department heads had no idea what they were authorized to spend. The result is predictable. When nobody is watching the checkbook, money finds a way out.
5/ Why GOPPAR Is the Only Number That Tells the Full Story
Each of these levers connects directly to gross operating profit per available room, the metric that tells the real story of a hotel’s performance. RevPAR measures revenue. GOPPAR measures what you actually keep.
As I see it, “If you can outperform the competition on revenue and be disciplined on your costs, your GOPPAR will be high.” Better rate discipline means more revenue at full price. Fewer OTA commissions means more of that revenue clears the commission line. Leaner labor scheduling means lower payroll. Department checkbooks mean fewer surprise overruns. All four together move GOPPAR in the right direction.
We have one hotel that generates just over five million dollars in annual room revenue and produces a GOPPAR above twenty thousand dollars per room. For a 120-unit property, that is $2.4 million in gross operating profit. That is not an accident. It is the result of discipline applied consistently across all four of these areas.
Not every hotel will hit that number, and not every market supports it. The 2026 hotel market outlook makes clear that RevPAR growth is flattening in many markets just as labor and operating costs stay elevated. In that environment, the hotels that win are not the ones chasing revenue at any cost. They are the ones converting more of their revenue to profit by running a tighter operation.
Thirty days is enough time to start turning around your hotel and seeing results. The operators who make these moves are not doing anything exotic. They are just running a more disciplined operation than the one next door.
By Robert Rauch
