When a hospitality business underperforms, there’s rarely a shortage of theories. It’s marketing. It’s pricing. We need more people. The PMS is terrible. Housekeeping can’t keep up. Guests are too demanding. Maybe. But before prescribing anything, we’d want to understand how the business actually works. If we walked into an underperforming hotel, short-term rental portfolio or property management operation tomorrow, these are the ten places we’d start.
1. Guest feedback
We wouldn’t stop at the average review score. We’d read the reviews and look for what keeps coming up: cleanliness, communication, maintenance, check-in, noise or value. Recurring guest complaints are operational data written in plain English.
2. Labor
We wouldn’t just ask whether labor is high. We’d ask why. Where are the hours going? Do schedules match demand? Are managers doing hourly work? Is overtime covering vacancies, or covering bad processes? Labor percentage tells you something is happening, but it doesn’t always tell you what.
3. The guest journey
We’d walk through the experience as if we’d never seen the business before: booking, pre-arrival, arrival, entry, the stay, support, departure and post-stay. Every unnecessary interaction creates cost, and every confusing one creates friction. The best guest experience isn’t necessarily the one with the most touchpoints. It’s the one where the right things happen at the right time.
4. Ownership
Ask three people who owns a process. If you get three different answers, congratulations: you found something. Unclear ownership creates duplicate work, missed work and endless escalation. We’d map the major responsibilities and work out who is actually accountable for each one.
5. Technology
What systems are you paying for? Which functions overlap, and what isn’t being used? Where is information being transferred by hand, and what still lives in a spreadsheet despite there supposedly being a platform for it? Technology should reduce operational effort. If it doesn’t, we want to know why.
6. Meetings
Yes, meetings. Show us the recurring calendar, because meetings often reveal organizational problems remarkably quickly. If twelve people need to attend a meeting every week to make routine operational decisions, the meeting may not be the problem. Decision-making might be.
7. Maintenance
We’d look beyond open work orders. What keeps recurring? What’s being patched instead of fixed? How long do issues stay open, and how many guest-facing problems could have been caught before arrival? Preventive maintenance isn’t glamorous. Neither is refunding a guest because the air conditioner failed for the third time.
8. Housekeeping and quality control
Cleanliness problems aren’t always housekeeping problems. Turn times, staffing models, linen logistics, inventory, inspection processes, maintenance coordination and unrealistic scheduling can all show up in a review as “The room wasn’t clean.” We’d look at the entire system around the cleaner.
9. Revenue leakage
This isn’t revenue strategy. It’s leakage: refunds, credits, chargebacks, uncollected fees, unused inventory, vendor overcharges, subscriptions, overtime and weak purchasing controls. Tiny leaks become remarkably large numbers when they’re multiplied across hundreds or thousands of stays.
10. What the frontline team says
This might be the most important one. Ask the people doing the work, “What makes your job harder than it needs to be?” Then stop talking. The people closest to the operation usually know where the friction lives. They may not always know the solution, but they can usually show you where to start looking.
Don’t fix everything at once
After looking at those ten areas, we’d resist the temptation to create a 47-item transformation plan. Instead, find the few things causing disproportionate pain. Fix those, measure what happened, then move on to the next thing. Operational improvement doesn’t have to begin with transformation. Sometimes it begins with removing one stupid thing everyone has been working around for two years.
Sometimes, the better way has already been found.
At Found Better, we've operated hospitality businesses from individual units to high-rise aparthotels and portfolios spanning thousands of keys. We've implemented technology, replaced technology, integrated technology—and occasionally discovered that the best solution was simply using what we already had better.
If you're trying to figure out whether your operation needs new technology, a better process, or both, bring us the problem.
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