The Future of Hospitality

The episode contains a genuine cluster of practitioner insights - the booking-curve replication trap, occupancy-only feedback creating conservatism, the single-brain organisation paralysis, and the over-knowledge pricing inhibitor - but these are diluted by lengthy meandering exchanges, throat-clearing, and several stretches of vague 'it depends' hedging that add runtime without adding learning.

“very often you look at what revenue management is trying to do. They're trying to replicate the booking curve of last year, because last year was perfect”

“no one ever gets, um, you know, never gets reprimanded for selling out too soon”

A few genuinely fresh frames appear - the structural observation that RM teams systematically mirror last year's curve as a career-safe heuristic, and the loyalty-hotel points-pricing dynamic where rooms are deliberately overpriced to manufacture perceived point value - but the AI commentary is increasingly generic and the broader discussion of centralisation vs. decentralisation is well-trodden.

“very often you look at what revenue management is trying to do. They're trying to replicate the booking curve of last year...Then you finish the year, you erase everything, and this is your new reference”

“the big uh hotel groups um have hotels that are more destinations that are designed for the customers to burn points...the incentive of the hotel group is to put that price extremely high. So that uh, when I go there as a customer and pay with my points I get the impression that I'm getting great value”

Rose and Charles are genuine consultants with 14-plus years of hands-on engagement work across hospitality and leisure, regularly sitting with revenue teams on the ground - credible practitioners rather than pure thought leaders. However, they are advisors rather than operators who built and scaled revenue functions themselves, and no seniority context is given for either guest beyond the consulting role.

“I always spend at least one, two, three days on the ground with a revenue management team talking to them, looking at what they're doing”

“I've sat there with a revenue manager before who wrote every price change into the brochure and that was the entire price tracking”

The guests offer useful illustrative vignettes - Stockholm hotels jumping to €7,800, Amsterdam arena over-pricing collapsing, a France revenue manager missing German event demand, a football-match inventory-hold play - but no outcome metrics, client names, revenue uplifts, or before/after figures are provided, and most examples stop short of being actionable case studies.

“I was traveling to Stockholm the other week...the hotels we were staying in for a couple of hundred euros are suddenly 7,800euros”

“they would keep the inventory until one week uh, before the date of the match and then uh, they release all the inventory at a price that's crazy compared to the product they have because they're the only hotel with any inventory left”

The host keeps the conversation moving and contributes useful anecdotes from personal client experience, but questions are frequently soft or leading ('is it also the case…'), follow-ups rarely push for numbers or counter-evidence, and there is no meaningful challenge to any claim made - the format stays collaborative rather than interrogative throughout.

“And is it only from an IT perspective or is it also going to be misalignment?”

“how many would you say would be not perfect? Is a very difficult question. But how many would be workable?”