The Maldives 40% Rule Is Real. So Is the Way Through It.

Forty percent of your gross sales, converted into rufiyaa by the 28th of next month. If you run a resort in the Maldives, that sentence now runs your month.

I have run two private-island resorts in that country, and I know what the dollar means out there. Fuel comes by boat and is priced in USD. Expat salaries go out in USD. Debt, management fees, the imported food that makes breakfast look the way guests expect, all USD. So when the law says nearly half of everything you sell must become local currency before you have paid a single bill, every operator feels it in the stomach first and the spreadsheet second.

The law itself is plain. Since September 1, resorts must convert 40% of monthly gross foreign currency sales through licensed banks by the 28th of the following month. Paying dollars for goods and services now needs prior approval through a central budgeting portal. Salaries stay an automatic exception. Selling dollars outside the official rate is a criminal offence. This is gazetted, it is live, and the deadline cycle has already started.

Now the part I actually want to talk about, because panic is not a plan and I have never met an island that survived on it. Here is what a well run resort does with this:

1. Rebuild the month around the 28th. Conversion is on gross sales, not on what is left after costs. Plan every month backwards from the conversion date, and let that date drive payroll, supplier runs and transfers.

2. Move every domestic cost into rufiyaa, formally. Local salaries, service charge, island suppliers, local logistics. Every dollar of domestic spend settled in rufiyaa is a dollar that stays available for what genuinely cannot be paid any other way.

3. Protect the legal dollar lines. Expat salaries remain payable in USD under the exception. Document that payroll properly and time the purchases early in the month, while bank allocations are fresh.

4. Treat fuel as a design problem. Heat, light and power is the second biggest cost on an island. Renegotiate what you can into rufiyaa, and run the solar and battery math again, this time counting the currency cost of the diesel habit itself.

5. File the paperwork like it matters. Budgets go into the portal thirty days ahead, concession applications for foreign debt go in early. Then run the resort as if no exemption is coming, because hope is not a treasury policy.

Now the caution, because somebody reading this is thinking about the other market, the one that pays above the official rate. Do not. It is a criminal offence now, with fines that dwarf a month of margin and a licence hanging over the building. The operators who come through this will be the ones whose books were boring.

And here is the hope, which is real. The demand side has not moved. Guests still book in dollars, arrivals are at records, and the product is unchanged. What changed is the plumbing. Resorts that redesign their payment flows now, expense by expense, year by year, will be standing when reserves stabilise, and they will be the ones banks and owners trust with the next island.

I have put together a working sheet for exactly this: how to handle the rest of this financial year, the next two years, and a five and ten year expense payment design for every major cost line. If you want it, message me on Instagram at @hpsbconsulting or email me at harjinder.barsal@gmail.com and I will send it across.

HPRD

Building a new resort or trying to fix a leaking P&L? I help owners bridge the gap between design plans and long-term operational profit. Let's connect on LinkedIn to discuss your project.

Kodawari Notes: Ten Extra Steps in Your Floor Plan Cost You a Salary Every Year

Before a single brick goes up on any project I consult on, I take the drawings and walk them the way a housekeeper, a steward and a room-service waiter will walk them for the next thirty years. Not with my eyes. With a stopwatch in my head. Because every meter of corridor you draw today is payroll you sign up for forever, and most architects have never carried a tray down one.

Let me show you the arithmetic, because it is embarrassingly simple. Say your floor layout adds just three minutes of dead walking per room cleaned. An attendant cleans fifteen rooms a shift. That is 45 wasted minutes a day, per attendant. Across a 150-room hotel running ten attendants, you have burned 450 minutes a day. Over a year, that is more than 2,700 hours. At Indian housekeeping wages plus benefits, you have designed yourself a permanent extra salary. Not once. Every year the building stands.

This is the layout audit I run on every pre-construction project, and these are the five things I look for first.

1. Put the linen room in the middle of the floor, not at the end. Architects love tucking service spaces into corners because corners are leftover space. Your attendants will walk to that corner forty times a day. A central linen point can cut the walking on a floor by a third.

2. Stack your floors identically. When every floor has the same room numbers in the same positions, staff stop thinking about navigation and start thinking about guests. A clever layout that is different on every floor is a daily tax on every shift.

3. Keep the service lift honest. I have ridden service lifts that open into a public corridor because the drawings never separated guest flow from staff flow. The result is trolleys parked in guest corridors, waiters squeezing past suitcases, and a hotel that looks tired at 11 in the morning. One dedicated BOH spine fixes it, but only if it is drawn before the concrete.

4. Marry the kitchen to both the restaurant and the banquet hall. Food that travels two hundred meters arrives cold, gets reheated, and costs you covers and compliments. Adjacency between production and the two biggest outlets is not a luxury. It is the difference between a banquet business and a banquet apology.

5. Draw the receiving dock to stores path in a straight line. Every case of beer and bag of rice will travel that path for decades. Two unnecessary turns and a step means broken cases, strained backs, and a receiving process your purchase team works around instead of with.

A caution, because I have seen this audit done badly too. The point is not to shrink back-of-house until the hotel cannot breathe. Strip too much and your team runs out of space to store, prep and rest, and service collapses in year one. The audit is about flow, not frugality. You are cutting steps, not standards.

The drawings stage is the only time these fixes are free. Once the slab is poured, the same fix costs a wall, a delay and a fight with your contractor. I charge owners a fraction of one year's wasted payroll to walk their plans with them. The ones who have done it never skip it again.

HPRD

Building a new resort or trying to fix a leaking P&L? I help owners bridge the gap between design plans and long-term operational profit. Let's connect on LinkedIn to discuss your project.

Kodawari Notes: The Brands Are Racing to Small-Town India. Someone Has to Run Those Hotels.

 BLOGGER PASTE KIT 08 of 9 - The Brands Are Racing to Small-Town India. Someone Has to Run Those Last week I read that 71 percent of the 51,647 branded hotel rooms signed in India in 2025 were in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. In the same few days, IHCL signed a Gateway in Sambalpur and a Ginger in Nava Raipur, Lemon Tree took a majority stake in a Shillong project, and Radisson planted flags in Sasan Gir and Rajkot. Thirty years ago I started as a waiter in towns exactly like these, and I can tell you what the press releases do not mention: signing the hotel is the easy part. Running it is where the money gets made or lost.

Do not misunderstand me. The shift is real, and the numbers behind it are solid. JLL counted those 51,647 signings across 424 properties in 2025, up 23 percent on the year before. Hotel investment hit roughly 567 million dollars, up 67 percent. Airports went from 74 in 2014 to 159 in 2024. Ayodhya handled 482,000 passengers in the first six months after its airport opened. Guwahati ran 6.16 million passengers through a terminal built for 2 million, and its new terminal takes capacity to 13.1 million. The demand is not imaginary.

But here is what thirty years of operations taught me about small-market hotels, and what I tell every owner who shows me a tier 3 site plan.

1. Your labor pool is thin, and your best people will leave. A tier 3 town does not have a deep bench of trained chefs, engineers and front-office staff. You will hire raw, train hard, and then watch your best performers get poached by the metros or the Gulf. Budget for that churn from day one, not as a surprise in year two.

2. Hire the general manager a full year before opening, not three months. In a small market the GM is not just an operator. He is your recruiter, your trainer, your liaison with the local college, and half your marketing department. A late GM hire in Sambalpur costs you far more than a late GM hire in Mumbai, where the brand office can cover the gap.

3. Build the training pipeline before you need it. Tie up with the nearest hospitality or ITI college while the hotel is still scaffolding. The owners who thrive in these markets grow their own people. The ones who struggle keep paying agencies to fly in supervisors from the city, and the P&L feels it every month.

4. Price for the town you are in, not the metro you left. I have seen owners apply big-city rate logic to a market where the best corporate account is a regional factory and the weekend wedding is the biggest event of the season. Small-market rate discipline means living off occupancy, F&B and functions. Rooms alone will not carry the asset.

5. Read the management contract like the owner you are. 81 percent of new rooms in India are signed on management contracts. The brand's fees come out whether the market delivers or not. In a tier 3 town, the gap between the brand's projection and the town's reality is your problem, not theirs. Negotiate performance tests and exit terms while the pen is still in your hand.

One caution before anyone rushes to buy land next to a new airport. Regional markets are volatile. Amritsar set a passenger record in 2024, saw Marriott and Hilton sign up, and then watched traffic fall 8.2 percent in 2025 on fog and airspace restrictions. Guwahati is booming, but eleven luxury hotels in one pipeline means some of those owners will be discounting to fill rooms within five years. The boom is real. So is the cycle.

The opportunity in small-town India is the best I have seen in my career. But the owners who win it will be the ones who spend as much time on the staffing plan as on the site plan. The brands know this. They are signing with other people's money.

HPRD

Building a new resort or trying to fix a leaking P&L? I help owners bridge the gap between design plans and long-term operational profit. Let's connect on LinkedIn to discuss your project.

Kodawari Notes: The Back of the House Is Where Your Margin Lives. Most Plans Starve It.

The ugliest corridor in your hotel decides more of your profit than the prettiest corner of your lobby.

Guests never see the back of the house. Owners do not see it either, and that is the problem. On the drawings it is the grey space left over after the architect has finished being brilliant. In real life it is where your payroll is won or lost, every shift, for thirty years.

I run a simple test on any plan put in front of me. I ignore the lobby render completely and I turn the page to the service areas. Here is what I am looking for, and what it costs when I do not find it.

1. Receiving that actually receives. Deliveries arrive every day: food, linen, chemicals, furniture, a birthday cake. If the receiving dock does not sit next to the stores, your stores officer walks every box across the building. Ten extra minutes a trolley, twenty deliveries a week, works out to a month of paid hours a year spent walking boxes across the building. That is one small flaw.

2. A laundry that touches the linen flow. Linen is the heaviest thing your hotel moves, and it moves twice a day per room. When the laundry is two floors and a lobby crossing from the linen rooms, you have hired people to push weight uphill, forever. Ten extra minutes per room per day in a two-hundred-room hotel is twelve thousand paid hours a year - an entire laundry team hired to walk. All for a line that could have been drawn straight.

3. A garbage route that never meets a guest. Wet waste leaves the kitchen every few hours. If its path to the dumpster crosses a guest corridor, you will either offend guests or pay staff to wait for empty corridors. Both cost. The fix on paper is one door in the right place. The fix after construction is a renovation.

4. Doors and corridors sized for the work. Housekeeping trolleys are wide. Banquet tables are wider. If the corridor turns are tight, every event costs an extra half hour of setup and a chipped wall a month. Architects draw corridors for people. Hotels run them with trolleys.

5. Engineering access that exists. Every valve, damper and fan coil will need a human hand one day. If the access panel is behind the headboard joinery, a one-hour repair becomes a room out of order for a night. Multiply that by every room, and a missing panel has a room-revenue price tag.

6. Staff areas that respect the staff. Your people enter, change, eat and rest somewhere. If that somewhere is an afterthought with no natural light next to the garbage room, you will read it later in your turnover numbers. Good staff areas are not charity. They are retention, and retention is margin.

Now the caution, because back-of-house generosity has a limit.

Every square meter you give to service space is a square meter that does not sell. The answer is not a huge back of house; it is a clever one. Adjacency beats area. A compact laundry in the right place outperforms a big one in the wrong place, and the right place is decided on the drawing, for free.

This is the reading I do before a single brick is laid. The lobby in the render will delight your guests. The service corridor on page nine will decide whether you make money delighting them. If your plans are still on paper, one review now is worth a renovation later.

HPRD

Building a new resort or trying to fix a leaking P&L? I help owners bridge the gap between design plans and long-term operational profit. Let's connect on LinkedIn to discuss your project.

Kodawari Notes: Brussels Delayed the AI Rules. Your Chatbot Did Not Get the Memo.

While the hotel trade press was celebrating a delay in Europe's new AI law, one part of it quietly became enforceable six weeks ago.

Here is the short version. Europe's AI Act is the first real law of its kind, and it touches hotels more than most owners realise. The heavy part, what Brussels calls high-risk AI, was supposed to bite on 2 August. Six days before that, a fix-it package called the Digital Omnibus moved the date. High-risk now lands on 2 December 2027.

Fifteen extra months. Everyone exhaled.

I almost did too. Then I read the small print, a habit from thirty years of signing contracts I did not write but had to live with. The delay covers the high-risk chapter only. The transparency duties went ahead on schedule. They have been live law since 2 August 2026.

Two things matter for your hotel right now.

First, if a guest is talking to a machine, the machine has to say so. Clearly, at the start. Your booking chatbot. Your WhatsApp concierge. That AI phone agent answering at 2 a.m. All of them.

Second, anything AI writes or polishes for you has to be labelled as AI.

Ignore this and the fine tier that fits most hotel systems goes up to 15 million euros, or 3 percent of worldwide turnover if that is bigger.

Now, the part that should interest you even if Europe is not in your plans.

1. The high-risk list is about your staff, not your guests. Software that screens CVs, builds rosters, watches performance - that is what Brussels calls high-risk. The rostering tool head office bought last year, the CV screener HR loves. From December 2027 these come with record-keeping and human-oversight duties in the EU. Ask your vendors the hard questions now, while they are still polite.

2. Europe sets the table the rest of the world eats at. I watched the chains with data protection. Nobody built two systems, a careful one and a careless one. They built to the strictest standard and rolled it out everywhere. If your brand or your OTA partner operates in Europe, their rulebook will arrive at your property wrapped in their logo.

3. Treat this as procurement, and let the lawyers come later. The job this quarter is an inventory. Walk the hotel and list every system with AI inside it. Chatbot, pricing engine, review-reply tool, CV screener. Then ask each vendor two questions. What does your system decide? What proof does it keep? Some will answer clearly. Keep those.

4. Use the delay. It is free time Brussels handed you, and free time is rare in this business. An afternoon on your inventory costs nothing. Wait for Brussels to come asking, and the same afternoon gets very expensive.

Now the caution.

Do not let anyone sell you panic. A boutique property in Kerala or Goa is not about to be raided by Brussels. What applies to most hotels today is plain honesty: tell the guest when they are talking to a machine. The heavy machinery lands later, mostly on the big groups. But if you are buying technology now, buy it European-compliant. Easier than ripping systems out in 2027.

I have sat in enough owners' meetings to know how this goes. The law sounds distant until the brand standard lands on your desk. Then it is due next quarter. Do the inventory first. It costs you one afternoon.

HPRD

Building a new resort or trying to fix a leaking P&L? I help owners bridge the gap between design plans and long-term operational profit. Let's connect on LinkedIn to discuss your project.

Kodawari Notes: A House for Two in Sicily. The Quiet Rise of the Five-Room Hotel.

This week I read about a hotel in Sicily that sleeps exactly two people. Not two suites. Two people. One house in the countryside, a pool, a sea breeze, and a booking calendar with no other names on it.

In thirty years around hotels I have watched our industry worship size - more keys, more covers, more banquet space. The most interesting openings of this year are going the other way. The smallest properties are charging the highest rates per room, and they are doing it on purpose.

Three examples, three continents.

Rui2, in Sicily, calls itself the house for two, and that is the whole concept. One couple at a time. No lobby, no breakfast queue, no strangers at the pool. The entire property is the room.

The Sen, closer to home in Uttarakhand, opened this year with four suites on a forested ridge at Velda Bada, between Rishikesh and Corbett. Four years in the making, run by people with Aman pedigree, an organic farm kitchen, and naturalists who walk guests into one of the most biodiverse forest corridors in the state. Four suites, positioned to out-earn hotels ten times its size.

And in November, enBED opens in the Kutsuki forest of Shiga, Japan - one group a day, all-inclusive, nobody else on the property. The forest is yours alone for the night.

Now, what should an owner actually learn from this? A few things, and none of them require a big balance sheet.

1. The math flips at the top. Four rooms at a super-premium rate, well filled, can match the topline of a much larger hotel running at ordinary tariffs - with a fraction of the staff, the linen, the breakage and the payroll anxiety. Nobody has ever written a one-star review about a queue that does not exist.

2. Small only works expensive. The sub-five-room model lives on rate, not volume. You cannot run a budget two-room house; the nightly number has to carry the whole property. That means the location must be genuinely special - a ridge, a forest, a vineyard, a bay - and the experience must justify the invoice. Ordinary places cannot do this. Extraordinary ones should think about it.

3. Scarcity does your marketing. When there are only two keys, sold out is a permanent condition, and a waiting list is the best advertisement ever invented. The small hotel does not chase demand. It limits supply and lets demand queue.

4. Service is personal or it is nothing. With four suites there is no department to hide behind. The owner who knows why you came, what you ate, and when you like your tea is the entire product. This is hospitality in its oldest form, before we built floors of it.

Now the caution, because I have watched good people fall in love with this model for the wrong reason.

A jewel box is not a shortcut. Four rooms means four rooms of revenue, and one cancelled weekend is a real hole in the month. The owner is often the staff, and if you do not love hosting, this property will punish you daily. And when the day comes to sell, a two-room property is a lifestyle, not a business - the buyer pool is as small as the hotel. Go in with clear eyes, a special place, and the patience The Sen showed: four years to get four rooms right, because perfect takes longer than adequate.

The big hotel teaches you systems. The tiny one teaches you hospitality. If you own a few acres somewhere beautiful and you are wondering what to build, the answer this year might be: far less than you planned, and far better than you imagined.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: Rs 2.4 Lakh a Night in Delhi. The Best Problem a Hotel Can Have.

This weekend Delhi is full. Not busy. Full.

The BRICS Summit lands in the capital on September 12 and 13, and the numbers coming out of the booking platforms are the kind hotel people read twice. Five-star rooms are touching Rs 2.4 lakh a night for the peak dates. Searches for five-star stays are up 50 percent. Luxury rates have climbed 59 percent year on year, four-stars are up 113 percent, and even budget hotels are booking 138 percent more rooms than last year. The Taj, the Oberoi, the Leela - sold out. Airfares into Delhi are up 39 percent. And here is the part I like most: 39 percent of international visitors are staying on past the summit. People came for two nights and decided the city was worth five.

Thirty years around hotels, and I still smile at a weekend like this. Compression is the fun kind of problem. The phone rings, the city hums, the lobby smells of coffee at midnight, and every room you have is worth more than it was on Monday. Nobody had to invent demand. Delhi did it for you.

But a full house is also a test, and some hotels fail it while the cash registers sing.

Let me lay out what a weekend like this actually teaches, whether you run a palace on Mansingh Road or a twelve-room place in the hills.

1. Price hard, but price like you plan to see the guest again. Compression pricing is honest business. Doubling your rate when the city sells out is the market doing its job. Tripling it and cancelling the fellow who booked early at the old rate is not revenue management. It is a short-term grab with a long memory. Guests forgive a high rate. They do not forgive being played.

2. The waitlist is gold. When you are sold out, the most valuable thing in the building is the list of people you had to say no to. Collect names properly, call back fast when a cancellation opens, and keep the list for the next big weekend. Most hotels treat a no as the end of a conversation. It should be the beginning.

3. Watch who extends. The most interesting number in the whole story is not Rs 2.4 lakh. It is that nearly four in ten international guests are staying past the summit. A compression event fills your rooms; the extension fills your future. These are the guests to wow, because they are deciding this week whether your city is a one-time assignment or a regular stop.

4. Your reputation is made at 2 AM, not at check-in. Full houses strain everything - hot water, elevators, breakfast, patience. The guest who paid Rs 2 lakh expects Rs 2 lakh of sleep, and one cold shower at the wrong hour becomes the review that outlives the weekend. The owner who walks the floors at midnight during compression learns more than any report will tell him.

5. Small hotels, take notes. You may never host a delegate, but your town has its own summits - a wedding season, a festival, a cricket match, a long weekend. The mechanics are identical. Know your compression dates a year ahead, hold some inventory back, keep your rates current everywhere the machines look, and never be the hotel that is sold out at yesterday's price on a third-party site.

Now the caution, because I have watched owners get drunk on a full house.

One great weekend fixes nothing by itself. I have seen hotels bank the money and skip the maintenance, raise rates once and never review them again, and worst of all, treat the compression guest as a wallet instead of a person. The summit ends Sunday night. By Tuesday the lobby will be quiet, and the hotels that win are the ones that turn a sold-out weekend into relationships, reviews and repeat bookings. The ones that lose are already counting the cash and forgetting the guest.

Delhi's big weekend is a reminder of the oldest truth in our trade. Demand is a gift. What you do with a full house is management.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: The OTA Bill Is Coming Due. Indian Owners Will Pay It First.

In thirty years around hotels, I have paid a lot of commissions. Travel agents in the eighties took ten percent and earned it - they brought the guest to a hotel he had never heard of. The OTAs took fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five, and told us it was the cost of being found. This month, in Europe, someone finally started reading that bill out loud.

Italy's competition authority has opened a probe into Booking's Preferred Partner programme - the one where a hotel pays more commission to appear higher in the list. In Türkiye, hotels are being invited to join a collective claim for compensation. And eighteen months after Europe banned Booking's rate-parity clauses, an industry review finds that not much has changed. Hotels hoped freedom from parity would bring the guests direct. Mostly, it did not.

Now come home.

1. Our middleman is bigger than theirs. MakeMyTrip and Goibibo, one company, hold more than half of India's online travel bookings - over ten billion dollars of gross bookings a year. The European hotels complain about Booking's grip. The Indian standalone owner deals with a platform that has even more market power and far less scrutiny.

2. Nobody is coming to help. Italy has a competition authority reading the fine print. India has no AGCM for hotels, and the courts move slowly. If you run a 40-room property in Jaipur or Coorg and you are waiting for a regulator to fix your commission, you will wait a long time.

3. The parity habit is ours, not theirs. Whatever contracts say after Europe, most Indian owners still hold the same rate everywhere, because the market manager asks nicely and the extranet makes it easy. The OTA is not stopping you from rewarding your direct guest. Your own rate discipline is.

So what should an independent owner actually do? Four things, none of them expensive.

4. Win the search you already own. For most Indian hotels, the first page a guest sees is not the OTA - it is the Google map result. Google Business Profile, current photos, answered reviews, correct rates flowing through Google Hotel Center. This costs time, not commission.

5. Read your channel manager's bill. Ask a plain question: which channels does my inventory flow to, at what net rate, and who sets the price the guest actually sees? Many owners cannot answer this. That is the problem in one sentence.

6. Make direct worth it. You will never outspend the platform. You can out-care it. A flexible checkout, breakfast thrown in, a phone number a human answers - the guest who books direct should get something the OTA cannot list in a filter.

7. Keep the guest. Every checkout is a chance to capture a name and an email properly. A returning guest who books direct is the one booking no platform can tax.

A word of caution from an old hotelier. Do not declare war on the OTAs. They bring real demand, especially to a property nobody has heard of, and the owner who delists in a temper usually relists within a quarter. The answer is not to leave the middleman. It is to stop being only his inventory. Build your direct trickle into a stream while the OTA tap is still running, because one day, as Europe is discovering, you will want both taps - and you will want to own one of them.

The bill is coming due everywhere. In India it will arrive quietly, without a regulator's headline. Read it now, while reading is still free.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: Google Will Now Book Your Guest's Room. Should Owners Cheer or Worry?

In thirty years around hotels I have watched the front door move three times. First the walk-in and the travel agent. Then the OTAs took the guest online. Then the brands fought back with book-direct campaigns. This month, the door moved again.

Google has switched on hotel booking inside AI Mode in Search. A traveler can now discover, compare, pick a room and pay - all inside one conversation with Google, settled through Google Pay. It started in the US in English at the end of August, and it is expanding. Your guest may never see your website. He may never see an OTA page either.

Let me lay out what actually happened, because the details matter.

1. Search became a booking desk. The guest asks, the AI compares, the room gets booked and paid for inside the chat. No ten open tabs. No filters. One conversation.

2. The pipes underneath are still the old pipes. Google's inventory comes through integrated partners - the chains and the big aggregators. The interface is new. The plumbing is familiar.

3. The loyalty shifts to the answer. When an AI does the choosing, the guest trusts the recommendation, not the brand name on the building. Whoever owns the conversation owns the guest.

Now, what does this mean for those of us on the owner's side of the table?

4. Commissions don't disappear. They change address. Every new middleman in history has promised to cut out the middleman. The economics will live inside the AI layer too - in placement, in partnerships, in who gets recommended. Count on it.

5. Your data is now your storefront. The AI recommends what it can read. Rates, availability, policies, photos, reviews - if your information is stale or missing where the machines look, you are invisible to the guest who never scrolls.

6. The direct relationship just became more valuable, not less. If Google holds the conversation, the only guest who is truly yours is the one whose email and trust you already hold.

So what should an independent owner actually do this quarter? Three moves, none of them expensive.

7. Make your hotel machine-readable. Clean, current rates and inventory everywhere the machines feed from - Google Hotel Center, your channel manager, your Google Business Profile. Fresh photos. Answered reviews. This is the new curb appeal.

8. Give guests a reason to stay yours. Capture emails properly at checkout, not as an afterthought. A returning guest who books direct is the one booking no algorithm can tax.

9. Know who feeds your inventory. Ask your channel manager and your OTA market manager a plain question: does my inventory flow into AI booking, through whom, and on what commercial terms? You cannot manage what you cannot see.

A word of caution, because I have seen this film before. Do not panic, and do not let anyone sell you fear wrapped as software. This is the US and English first, and adoption takes time - the fax machine and the OTA both took years to bite. The hotels that win these shifts are never the fastest to buy new tools. They are the ones whose basics are so solid that every new channel, however it arrives, finds them ready.

The guest still wants a clean room, a warm welcome and a fair price. Only the doorman has changed. Keep your house in order, keep your data honest, and the door - wherever it moves - will keep opening for you. That is what keeps an old hotelier soul happy.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: Hire for the Problem, Not the Decade

A recruiter I follow wrote something this week that most hiring managers will not say out loud: the general manager's job is quietly becoming a contract role. Fewer ten-year GMs, more specialists who come in, fix the pre-opening, the renovation, the guest scores, and move to the next challenge.

He is right. And I would take it one step further. It is not just the GM's job. It is the whole shape of help in our industry.

I spent thirty years inside hotels, from waiter to general manager, and now I consult on the owner's side of the table. Looking back, the best money I ever saw an owner spend was never on the longest contract. It was on the clearest task.

That is how I work today, and I think every owner should demand it, from consultants and increasingly from leaders too. Here is why.

1. The empty seat costs more than the specialist. Owners tell me they will wait for the perfect permanent hire. Meanwhile the pre-opening slips three months, the reviews slide, and the team drifts. A task-based expert costs money for ninety days. An empty chair costs money every single day, and it never sends an invoice, so nobody adds it up.

2. A task has a finish line. A retainer has a renewal. When scope is written down - raise GOP by this much, deliver the pre-opening by this date, fix the audit score - both sides know what done looks like. Work that cannot be measured has a way of never ending.

3. Specialists carry pattern recognition you cannot grow at home. A man who has opened fifteen hotels has made fifteen hotels' worth of mistakes, on someone else's budget. Your permanent team, however good, has lived one hotel. Sometimes you need the man who has seen the film before.

4. Your own people get stronger, not replaced. The right way to run a task-based assignment is shoulder to shoulder with your team, so the methods stay behind when the consultant leaves. If nothing transfers, you have rented a crutch, not hired a teacher.

5. The math favors it. A permanent senior hire costs salary, benefits, and the risk of a wrong fit for years. A defined assignment costs a fee, once, against a result you agreed in writing. Owners who think consultants are expensive should price the alternative honestly.

Now the caution, because this model fails too, and I have watched it fail.

A task-based engagement dies when the brief is vague. "Come and improve things" is not a task; it is a wish. Before you bring anyone in, write down the problem in one sentence, the number that will prove it is fixed, and the date. If you cannot do that, you are not ready to hire help - you are ready to sit down with your own team first. And some roles genuinely are permanent. You cannot task-force the daily running of a full hotel. The art is knowing which problems have edges and which do not.

The ten-year GM is not disappearing, and good ones are worth their weight in gold. But the owners who learn to buy expertise by the task - clear scope, agreed deliverables, a beginning and an end - will always outrun the ones still waiting for the perfect resume to walk through the door.

Hire for the problem. Measure the result. Shake hands at the finish line. That is what keeps both sides honest, and this old hotelier soul happy.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: The Most Expensive Mistakes in Your Hotel Are Already on the Drawing Board

The most expensive mistakes in a hotel are drawn, not made - and they are drawn before the first guest ever books.

I have walked through more hotel blueprints than I can count. The plans are always beautiful. The lobby soars, the rooms glow, the pool catches the evening light. Then the hotel opens, and by the third week the general manager is quietly going mad, because the laundry is two floors from the linen rooms, the kitchen is a hundred paces from the tables it serves, and every morning the staff cross the lobby with trolleys while the guests are eating breakfast.

None of that is an operations failure. It is a drawing failure. Operations only gets the bill.

A blueprint decides your payroll for the next thirty years. Let me show you what I check when an owner puts plans in front of me.

1. Follow the linen. Trace one dirty sheet from the guest room to the laundry and back. Count the steps, the doors, the lift rides. Do the same for a clean one. If the path crosses guest areas, or takes a housekeeper ten extra minutes per trolley, you have just hired people to walk. Multiply that by every room, every day, every year.

2. Follow the plate. Where does food leave the kitchen, and how far does it travel? Every extra door between the stove and the table is heat lost, time lost, and a waiter who cannot be in two places at once. Room service across a skybridge looks clever in the render. At midnight in the rain it is a complaint.

3. Follow the staff. Where do your people enter, change, eat, and rest? If the only way to the staff canteen is through the guest lift lobby, you did not save space. You bought thirty years of friction, and the guest pays for it in the experience.

4. Follow the money. Back-of-house square meters do not sell a single room, I know. But they decide how many hands you need to run the place. A tight, clever back-of-house runs with fewer people and less overtime. A bad one staffs itself with problems, and the payroll line learns it before you do.

Now the caution, because this is not an attack on architects.

Architects are good people doing exactly what they are rewarded for: a building that photographs well, passes approvals, and fits a cost per key. Nobody in that room is paid to ask how a chambermaid moves through a floor at 9 AM. That question belongs to the owner - and the owner usually meets it too late, when moving a wall costs ten times what moving a line would have. Bring operations thinking to the drawing table before the concrete, not after the opening.

This is the heart of what I do. I read plans with an operator's eyes, and I have spent thirty years learning where hotels quietly leak money, one unnecessary step at a time. If your project is still lines on paper, this is the cheapest consulting you will ever buy. If it is already built, the same eyes can tell you where the leaks are and which ones are still worth fixing.

Building a new resort or trying to fix a leaking P&L? I help owners bridge the gap between design plans and long-term operational profit. Let's connect on LinkedIn to discuss your project.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: Ahmedabad Needs 22,000 More Hotel Rooms by 2030. Who Builds Them?

 Illustrated skyline of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the twin cities on the Sabarmati]

Four years to find 22,000 rooms that do not exist - that is the assignment one Indian city has just been handed.

A university in Gujarat has just published a piece of arithmetic that every hotel owner in India should read. Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, the twin cities on the Sabarmati, have about 18,000 hotel rooms between them. To host the 2030 Commonwealth Games - and the World Police and Fire Games the year before - they will need about 40,000.

That is a gap of 22,000 rooms. In one metro. With four years to close it.

I have spent thirty years in hotels, and I have rarely seen a number this clean. The study, out of CEPT University, counts every segment. The twin cities hold about 3,700 five-star keys, 1,500 four-star keys, and a few hundred rooms in resorts and boutique houses. Even today, on an ordinary week with no Games anywhere in sight, the better hotels run at 60 to 68 percent occupancy. So understand this clearly: the shortage is not a Games-time spike. It is structural. The researchers put the demand-supply gap at 65 percent in luxury, 60 percent in budget, 70 percent near the airport - and 90 percent in meeting and exhibition space.

Ninety percent. The city wants to welcome the Commonwealth family and does not own the ballrooms.

Chart showing the twin cities holding about 18,000 hotel rooms against about 40,000 needed by 2030, a gap of 22,000 rooms across segments]

Can it be done? Others have done harder. Barcelona tripled its hotel capacity in the five years before the 1992 Olympics. Doha added seventy thousand beds in four years for the 2022 World Cup, much of it through public-private partnership. India builds fast when it decides to. The question is never concrete. The question is judgment.

Chart of event precedents: Barcelona tripled hotel capacity in five years before the 1992 Olympics and Doha added 70,000 beds in four years for the 2022 World Cup]

If you are an owner or an investor watching this, here is what I would tell you across a table.

1. This is not one shortage. It is four. Luxury, budget, airport, and meetings are four different markets with four different gaps. Rooms will get all the newspaper attention, but the loudest number in the study is that 90 percent gap in event space. The money may not be where everyone is looking.

2. New doors for money are opening. The study proposes a sports-hospitality investment trust on the Singapore model, land mechanisms like TDR-plus, and public-private partnership. When a government wants rooms this badly, the terms for the builder improve. Watch the policy announcements, not just the land prices.

3. Build for 2033, not 2030. The Games last twelve days. Your hotel lasts thirty years. Barcelona's rooms still earn because the city kept growing after the flame went out. Doha learned the harder lesson about building for an event alone. Design for the Tuesday after the closing ceremony - the business traveller, the medical visitor, the wedding season.

4. Read the ordinary week. Today the city fills 60 to 68 percent of its better rooms with no event at all. That quiet number is your real demand curve. Everything the Games adds on top of it is a bonus, not the business plan.

Now the caution, because I have watched event deadlines burn good money.

A university study, however careful, is a map and not a contract. Before you buy a plot, pay for your own demand study - this one is a fine place to start, and a poor place to stop. Big-event calendars in our country have slipped before, and a hotel timed for a date that moves is an expensive lesson. And remember that every developer in Gujarat is reading the same 22,000-room number this week. If everyone builds the same mid-market box on the same corridor, the shortage becomes a glut exactly where you are standing. The gap is real, but it will reward the specific, not the general.

This, in the end, is the work I do. If you are looking at land on the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar corridor, or wondering which segment of that gap belongs to you - the feasibility study, the segment choice, the brand question, the pre-opening plan - that is what HPSB Consulting is for. Far better to spend a few weeks on the arithmetic now than thirty years in the wrong building.

HPRD

Building a new resort or trying to fix a leaking P&L? I help owners bridge the gap between design plans and long-term operational profit. Let's connect on LinkedIn to discuss your project.

Kodawari Notes: Occupancy Fell. Profit Rose. The New Math of Hotel Money.

Last month a hotel company in America reported its best second quarter on record. Revenue per available room touched an all-time high. And here is the line that should make every owner sit up: they did it while selling slightly fewer rooms.

Chatham Lodging, which owns extended-stay and select-service hotels across the US, put up a RevPAR of 158 dollars, its highest ever for the quarter. Occupancy actually slipped half a point to 81 percent. The average rate climbed nearly 4 percent to 195 dollars, and funds from operations per share jumped 22 percent in a year. Read that again. The profit did not come from fuller hotels. It came from the price of the room.

In the same week, half a world away, Blackstone decided to take its hotel company public. Hotel Investment Partners - 61 resorts around the Mediterranean - is headed for the Madrid stock exchange at a valuation of about 6.9 billion dollars. Blackstone spent two years thinking about selling it quietly. It chose the public market instead, because investors will now pay real money for hotel cash flows.

Two different stories, one lesson. This year, the money in hotels is in the rate.

Now let me bring this home, to the owner of a 40-room independent hotel in India.

1. Rate is a decision. Occupancy is a result. The big owners decided what their room was worth and let the last few rooms stay unsold. Most independents do the opposite - shave the rate to fill the house, and call it strategy. One of these is a business. The other is a habit.

2. The cheap room is the most expensive room you sell. Every discounted booking teaches the market your real price, and the market has a long memory. A guest who buys you at 4,000 will wait for 4,000 again. The rate you drop today is the rate you defend all next year.

3. Know your three numbers cold. Average daily rate. RevPAR. Gross operating profit margin. The listed companies quote them to the decimal every quarter. If you cannot state yours for last month without calling your accountant, that is the first fix, and it costs nothing.

4. Your P&L is your valuation. A 6.9 billion dollar price tag is just a profit story wearing a suit. Whether you ever sell, refinance, or bring in a partner, your hotel is worth a multiple of the earnings you can prove. Pricing power is the strongest proof there is - stronger than occupancy charts, stronger than a full parking lot.

Now the caution, because rate is a sharp tool and I have watched it cut both ways.

Pricing power is earned, not declared. Chatham held its rate because the product, the service and the reviews held first. Raise the price on a tired property and you will quickly learn the difference between pricing power and wishful thinking. And remember the scale difference: the giants have treasuries and hedges, you have one balance sheet. Grow the rate one season at a time, fix the product as you go, and let the guest experience carry the number.

For years our industry celebrated the full house, and owners bragged about occupancy at parties. The times have changed. The owners who will look smartest this decade are the ones who can quietly say: my hotel was a little emptier, and a lot richer.

HPRD

Travel Diaries: Twelve Days to Antarctica: Penguins, Red Parkas and One Very Cold Swim

There is a particular silence that belongs only to ice. I heard it first on a black beach at the bottom of the world, sixty-odd of us in identical red parkas, all of us suddenly quiet at the same time. But I am getting ahead of myself. Twelve days, end of November into December, and a journey that begins, of all places, with an empanada in Santiago.

We flew into Chile and gave Santiago a day. A cafe table in the sun, empanadas that arrived hot enough to demand respect, and an evening walk up Cerro Santa Lucia, the old hill in the middle of the city, all stone steps and brick towers, where the whole group climbed up for the first photographs of the trip. Everybody was fresh. Everybody was smiling. Nobody was wearing thermals yet.

The next morning the airport departures board said Punta Arenas, and by afternoon we were on a smaller jet with ANTARCTIC AIRWAYS written down its side, flying over the end of South America. There is no gentle way to reach the ice, so we did the sensible thing and skipped the Drake Passage entirely, landing on a gravel strip on King George Island, where the wind introduced itself immediately. And there, out in the grey water, was our ship, waiting like a lit-up hotel that had wandered very far from town.

She was a Silversea expedition ship, all brass and carpet and a golden spiral staircase, and because it was December, there was a Christmas tree in the show lounge. Think about that. A Christmas tree, in a theatre, sailing towards Antarctica. We had a day at sea to find our sea legs, which some of us found in the morning stretch class and some of us found at the bar. In the evening the whole group turned up in matching white sweatshirts, hearts on the front, names on the back, and took over the stage for photographs. The crew applauded. They had clearly not seen sixteen Indians coordinate outfits before.

Then the ice arrived. It does not creep up on you. One hour the horizon is empty, the next there is a berg the size of a housing colony sitting in the water, and then the mountains of the peninsula rise up, white on white, and the ship slows, and the red parkas come out.

The first landing was a rocky black beach with snow peaks behind it, and we stood there stamping our boots like people trying to convince the ground we had really come. Two days later, on another landing, somebody produced the tricolour, and there it was, India against all that white, sixteen of us behind it grinning like we had won something. Perhaps we had.

The penguins, I should tell you, run the place. At one colony they watched us climb up their rocks with the bored expression of landlords who have seen too many tenants. They are curious for about four seconds, then they go back to whatever penguins think about. In the water they fly. On land they waddle like little waiters in a hurry. We photographed them for hours. They did not photograph us back, which says something about their character.

Now, the polar plunge. The ship opens a platform at the waterline, the crew ties a rope around you, the doctor stands by, and you jump into the Southern Ocean, where the water is roughly the temperature of regret. I will not name everyone who jumped. I will say that those of us who jumped came out making sounds none of us had made before, and those who watched from the deck with hot drinks made the better decision and know it.

The days that followed blurred into one long golden evening, because in December the sun barely sets there. At ten at night the mountains turn to copper and the water goes still as glass, and the zodiacs drift between icebergs carved into arches and towers, and nobody talks. You run out of words at the bottom of the world, so you just look. One morning we landed by a tiny red refuge hut standing alone in the snow, the loneliest building I have ever seen, stocked by a country that hopes nobody ever needs it. Another day we climbed a long flagged route up a snow ridge, and from the top the whole bay lay below us, the ship small as a toy, and for once the photograph really does look like the thing itself.

All too soon it was the farewell dinner, and then the last evening, alongside at King George Island, the ship glowing against a dark sky while we stood on the pier taking one more group photo, because one more is what groups like ours do. On the last morning the penguins came to say goodbye. I am fairly sure they were actually just standing there, but we were leaving, so let me have that one.

What stays with me is not the cold. It is the light. Gold at midnight, blue inside the ice, white that is not white but fifty shades of it. And the silence, and the red parkas, and our flag on the snow, and sixteen people who jumped into the freezing sea together and laughed about it over dinner for a week.

The soul came home frozen. And happy.

HPRD

#Antarctica #TravelDiaries #Silversea #KingGeorgeIsland #PolarPlunge #Penguins #Santiago #TravelBlog #HPRD

Kodawari Notes: Rs 2.4 Lakh a Night in Delhi. The Best Problem a Hotel Can Have.

This weekend Delhi is full. Not busy. Full.

The BRICS Summit lands in the capital on September 12 and 13, and the numbers coming out of the booking platforms are the kind hotel people read twice. Five-star rooms are touching Rs 2.4 lakh a night for the peak dates. Searches for five-star stays are up 50 percent. Luxury rates have climbed 59 percent year on year, four-stars are up 113 percent, and even budget hotels are booking 138 percent more rooms than last year. The Taj, the Oberoi, the Leela - sold out. Airfares into Delhi are up 39 percent. And here is the part I like most: 39 percent of international visitors are staying on past the summit. People came for two nights and decided the city was worth five.

Thirty years around hotels, and I still smile at a weekend like this. Compression is the fun kind of problem. The phone rings, the city hums, the lobby smells of coffee at midnight, and every room you have is worth more than it was on Monday. Nobody had to invent demand. Delhi did it for you.

But a full house is also a test, and some hotels fail it while the cash registers sing.

Let me lay out what a weekend like this actually teaches, whether you run a palace on Mansingh Road or a twelve-room place in the hills.

1. Price hard, but price like you plan to see the guest again. Compression pricing is honest business. Doubling your rate when the city sells out is the market doing its job. Tripling it and cancelling the fellow who booked early at the old rate is not revenue management. It is a short-term grab with a long memory. Guests forgive a high rate. They do not forgive being played.

2. The waitlist is gold. When you are sold out, the most valuable thing in the building is the list of people you had to say no to. Collect names properly, call back fast when a cancellation opens, and keep the list for the next big weekend. Most hotels treat a no as the end of a conversation. It should be the beginning.

3. Watch who extends. The most interesting number in the whole story is not Rs 2.4 lakh. It is that nearly four in ten international guests are staying past the summit. A compression event fills your rooms; the extension fills your future. These are the guests to wow, because they are deciding this week whether your city is a one-time assignment or a regular stop.

4. Your reputation is made at 2 AM, not at check-in. Full houses strain everything - hot water, elevators, breakfast, patience. The guest who paid Rs 2 lakh expects Rs 2 lakh of sleep, and one cold shower at the wrong hour becomes the review that outlives the weekend. The owner who walks the floors at midnight during compression learns more than any report will tell him.

5. Small hotels, take notes. You may never host a delegate, but your town has its own summits - a wedding season, a festival, a cricket match, a long weekend. The mechanics are identical. Know your compression dates a year ahead, hold some inventory back, keep your rates current everywhere the machines look, and never be the hotel that is sold out at yesterday's price on a third-party site.

Now the caution, because I have watched owners get drunk on a full house.

One great weekend fixes nothing by itself. I have seen hotels bank the money and skip the maintenance, raise rates once and never review them again, and worst of all, treat the compression guest as a wallet instead of a person. The summit ends Sunday night. By Tuesday the lobby will be quiet, and the hotels that win are the ones that turn a sold-out weekend into relationships, reviews and repeat bookings. The ones that lose are already counting the cash and forgetting the guest.

Delhi's big weekend is a reminder of the oldest truth in our trade. Demand is a gift. What you do with a full house is management.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: The OTA Bill Is Coming Due. Indian Owners Will Pay It First.

In thirty years around hotels, I have paid a lot of commissions. Travel agents in the eighties took ten percent and earned it - they brought the guest to a hotel he had never heard of. The OTAs took fifteen, then twenty, then twenty-five, and told us it was the cost of being found. This month, in Europe, someone finally started reading that bill out loud.

Italy's competition authority has opened a probe into Booking's Preferred Partner programme - the one where a hotel pays more commission to appear higher in the list. In Türkiye, hotels are being invited to join a collective claim for compensation. And eighteen months after Europe banned Booking's rate-parity clauses, an industry review finds that not much has changed. Hotels hoped freedom from parity would bring the guests direct. Mostly, it did not.

Now come home.

1. Our middleman is bigger than theirs. MakeMyTrip and Goibibo, one company, hold more than half of India's online travel bookings - over ten billion dollars of gross bookings a year. The European hotels complain about Booking's grip. The Indian standalone owner deals with a platform that has even more market power and far less scrutiny.

2. Nobody is coming to help. Italy has a competition authority reading the fine print. India has no AGCM for hotels, and the courts move slowly. If you run a 40-room property in Jaipur or Coorg and you are waiting for a regulator to fix your commission, you will wait a long time.

3. The parity habit is ours, not theirs. Whatever contracts say after Europe, most Indian owners still hold the same rate everywhere, because the market manager asks nicely and the extranet makes it easy. The OTA is not stopping you from rewarding your direct guest. Your own rate discipline is.

So what should an independent owner actually do? Four things, none of them expensive.

4. Win the search you already own. For most Indian hotels, the first page a guest sees is not the OTA - it is the Google map result. Google Business Profile, current photos, answered reviews, correct rates flowing through Google Hotel Center. This costs time, not commission.

5. Read your channel manager's bill. Ask a plain question: which channels does my inventory flow to, at what net rate, and who sets the price the guest actually sees? Many owners cannot answer this. That is the problem in one sentence.

6. Make direct worth it. You will never outspend the platform. You can out-care it. A flexible checkout, breakfast thrown in, a phone number a human answers - the guest who books direct should get something the OTA cannot list in a filter.

7. Keep the guest. Every checkout is a chance to capture a name and an email properly. A returning guest who books direct is the one booking no platform can tax.

A word of caution from an old hotelier. Do not declare war on the OTAs. They bring real demand, especially to a property nobody has heard of, and the owner who delists in a temper usually relists within a quarter. The answer is not to leave the middleman. It is to stop being only his inventory. Build your direct trickle into a stream while the OTA tap is still running, because one day, as Europe is discovering, you will want both taps - and you will want to own one of them.

The bill is coming due everywhere. In India it will arrive quietly, without a regulator's headline. Read it now, while reading is still free.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: A House for Two in Sicily. The Quiet Rise of the Five-Room Hotel.

This week I read about a hotel in Sicily that sleeps exactly two people. Not two suites. Two people. One house in the countryside, a pool, a sea breeze, and a booking calendar with no other names on it.

In thirty years around hotels I have watched our industry worship size - more keys, more covers, more banquet space. The most interesting openings of this year are going the other way. The smallest properties are charging the highest rates per room, and they are doing it on purpose.

Three examples, three continents.

Rui2, in Sicily, calls itself the house for two, and that is the whole concept. One couple at a time. No lobby, no breakfast queue, no strangers at the pool. The entire property is the room.

The Sen, closer to home in Uttarakhand, opened this year with four suites on a forested ridge at Velda Bada, between Rishikesh and Corbett. Four years in the making, run by people with Aman pedigree, an organic farm kitchen, and naturalists who walk guests into one of the most biodiverse forest corridors in the state. Four suites, positioned to out-earn hotels ten times its size.

And in November, enBED opens in the Kutsuki forest of Shiga, Japan - one group a day, all-inclusive, nobody else on the property. The forest is yours alone for the night.

Now, what should an owner actually learn from this? A few things, and none of them require a big balance sheet.

1. The math flips at the top. Four rooms at a super-premium rate, well filled, can match the topline of a much larger hotel running at ordinary tariffs - with a fraction of the staff, the linen, the breakage and the payroll anxiety. Nobody has ever written a one-star review about a queue that does not exist.

2. Small only works expensive. The sub-five-room model lives on rate, not volume. You cannot run a budget two-room house; the nightly number has to carry the whole property. That means the location must be genuinely special - a ridge, a forest, a vineyard, a bay - and the experience must justify the invoice. Ordinary places cannot do this. Extraordinary ones should think about it.

3. Scarcity does your marketing. When there are only two keys, sold out is a permanent condition, and a waiting list is the best advertisement ever invented. The small hotel does not chase demand. It limits supply and lets demand queue.

4. Service is personal or it is nothing. With four suites there is no department to hide behind. The owner who knows why you came, what you ate, and when you like your tea is the entire product. This is hospitality in its oldest form, before we built floors of it.

Now the caution, because I have watched good people fall in love with this model for the wrong reason.

A jewel box is not a shortcut. Four rooms means four rooms of revenue, and one cancelled weekend is a real hole in the month. The owner is often the staff, and if you do not love hosting, this property will punish you daily. And when the day comes to sell, a two-room property is a lifestyle, not a business - the buyer pool is as small as the hotel. Go in with clear eyes, a special place, and the patience The Sen showed: four years to get four rooms right, because perfect takes longer than adequate.

The big hotel teaches you systems. The tiny one teaches you hospitality. If you own a few acres somewhere beautiful and you are wondering what to build, the answer this year might be: far less than you planned, and far better than you imagined.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: Google Will Now Book Your Guest's Room. Should Owners Cheer or Worry?

In thirty years around hotels I have watched the front door move three times. First the walk-in and the travel agent. Then the OTAs took the guest online. Then the brands fought back with book-direct campaigns. This month, the door moved again.

Google has switched on hotel booking inside AI Mode in Search. A traveler can now discover, compare, pick a room and pay - all inside one conversation with Google, settled through Google Pay. It started in the US in English at the end of August, and it is expanding. Your guest may never see your website. He may never see an OTA page either.

Let me lay out what actually happened, because the details matter.

1. Search became a booking desk. The guest asks, the AI compares, the room gets booked and paid for inside the chat. No ten open tabs. No filters. One conversation.

2. The pipes underneath are still the old pipes. Google's inventory comes through integrated partners - the chains and the big aggregators. The interface is new. The plumbing is familiar.

3. The loyalty shifts to the answer. When an AI does the choosing, the guest trusts the recommendation, not the brand name on the building. Whoever owns the conversation owns the guest.

Now, what does this mean for those of us on the owner's side of the table?

4. Commissions don't disappear. They change address. Every new middleman in history has promised to cut out the middleman. The economics will live inside the AI layer too - in placement, in partnerships, in who gets recommended. Count on it.

5. Your data is now your storefront. The AI recommends what it can read. Rates, availability, policies, photos, reviews - if your information is stale or missing where the machines look, you are invisible to the guest who never scrolls.

6. The direct relationship just became more valuable, not less. If Google holds the conversation, the only guest who is truly yours is the one whose email and trust you already hold.

So what should an independent owner actually do this quarter? Three moves, none of them expensive.

7. Make your hotel machine-readable. Clean, current rates and inventory everywhere the machines feed from - Google Hotel Center, your channel manager, your Google Business Profile. Fresh photos. Answered reviews. This is the new curb appeal.

8. Give guests a reason to stay yours. Capture emails properly at checkout, not as an afterthought. A returning guest who books direct is the one booking no algorithm can tax.

9. Know who feeds your inventory. Ask your channel manager and your OTA market manager a plain question: does my inventory flow into AI booking, through whom, and on what commercial terms? You cannot manage what you cannot see.

A word of caution, because I have seen this film before. Do not panic, and do not let anyone sell you fear wrapped as software. This is the US and English first, and adoption takes time - the fax machine and the OTA both took years to bite. The hotels that win these shifts are never the fastest to buy new tools. They are the ones whose basics are so solid that every new channel, however it arrives, finds them ready.

The guest still wants a clean room, a warm welcome and a fair price. Only the doorman has changed. Keep your house in order, keep your data honest, and the door - wherever it moves - will keep opening for you. That is what keeps an old hotelier soul happy.

HPRD

Kodawari Notes: Hire for the Problem, Not the Decade

 A recruiter I follow wrote somethin this week that most hiring managers will not say out loud: the general manager’s job is quietly becoming a contract role. Fewer ten-year GMs, more specialists who come in, fix the pre-opening, the renovation, the guest scores, and move to the next challenge.

He is right. And I would take it one step further. It is not just the GM’s job. It is the whole shape of help in our industry.

I spent thirty years inside hotels, from waiter to general manager, and now I consult on the owner’s side of the table. Looking back, the best money I ever saw an owner spend was never on the longest contract. It was on the clearest task.

That is how I work today, and I think every owner should demand it, from consultants and increasingly from leaders too. Here is why.

1. The empty seat costs more than the specialist. Owners tell me they will wait for the perfect permanent hire. Meanwhile the pre-opening slips three months, the reviews slide, and the team drifts. A task-based expert costs money for ninety days. An empty chair costs money every single day, and it never sends an invoice, so nobody adds it up.

2. A task has a finish line. A retainer has a renewal. When scope is written down — raise GOP by this much, deliver the pre-opening by this date, fix the audit score — both sides know what done looks like. Work that cannot be measured has a way of never ending.

3. Specialists carry pattern recognition you cannot grow at home. A man who has opened fifteen hotels has made fifteen hotels’ worth of mistakes, on someone else’s budget. Your permanent team, however good, has lived one hotel. Sometimes you need the man who has seen the film before.

4. Your own people get stronger, not replaced. The right way to run a task-based assignment is shoulder to shoulder with your team, so the methods stay behind when the consultant leaves. If nothing transfers, you have rented a crutch, not hired a teacher.

5. The math favors it. A permanent senior hire costs salary, benefits, and the risk of a wrong fit for years. A defined assignment costs a fee, once, against a result you agreed in writing. Owners who think consultants are expensive should price the alternative honestly.

I say this from the middle of it, not from a podium. My last two assignments have been exactly this: task-based, eighteen months each. The deliverables were written down and the path laid out before the contract was signed. Every milestone of the eighteen-month journey was marked before I walked in the door. Both sides knew what done looked like from day one, and nobody has had to renegotiate anything since. That is not a theory. That is my calendar.

Now the caution, because this model fails too, and I have watched it fail.

A task-based engagement dies when the brief is vague. “Come and improve things” is not a task; it is a wish. Before you bring anyone in, write down the problem in one sentence, the number that will prove it is fixed, and the date. If you cannot do that, you are not ready to hire help — you are ready to sit down with your own team first. And some roles genuinely are permanent. You cannot task-force the daily running of a full hotel. The art is knowing which problems have edges and which do not.

The ten-year GM is not disappearing, and good ones are worth their weight in gold. But the owners who learn to buy expertise by the task — clear scope, agreed deliverables, a beginning and an end — will always outrun the ones still waiting for the perfect resume to walk through the door.

Hire for the problem. Measure the result. Shake hands at the finish line. That is what keeps both sides honest, and this old hotelier soul happy.

HPRD

Travel Diaries: Eleven Days in Scandinavia: Fjords, Ferries and a Very Cold Drink

Some trips you plan. Some trips just carry you along, and all you have to do is keep your eyes open. Our eleven days in Sweden and Norway this July were the second kind. Sixteen of us, one coach, two countries, and more water than I have seen in years.

We landed in Stockholm in the evening, the kind of Nordic summer evening that refuses to end. By half past eight we were standing on the marina at Hammarby Sjostad, the water still, the boats sleeping, all of us squeezed into one frame for the first group photo of the trip. Dinner that night was Indian. Old habits travel well.

Stockholm gave us a full day and used it well. The City Hall first, where the Nobel banquet is held. The Blue Hall is not blue, which the guide enjoyed telling us, and the Golden Hall upstairs really is gold, wall after wall of it, mosaics telling the story of the city in little shining squares. Then the old town, Gamla Stan, with lanes so narrow you can touch both sides if you stretch. And then the Vasa, a warship that sank in 1628 on its first outing, barely a kilometre into its own harbour, and was pulled up 333 years later almost whole. You stand in front of it and it towers over you, dark and carved and quietly embarrassing for whoever designed it. We ended the day in an ice bar, of all places, wrapped in hooded capes, drinking from glasses made of ice. In July. My morning chai felt very far away.

The next morning the coach turned west and Sweden rolled past the window, wheat fields and red cottages and long quiet lakes. We broke the journey at Karlstad, on the edge of Lake Vanern, a lake so big it behaves like a sea. In the evening we walked through a colony of allotment gardens, tiny red cabins with flower beds and flags, each one somebody's summer dream. There is something very content about a country that builds little gardens for its city people.

Then Norway, and the road began to climb. We stopped at an old stave church, black tarred wood, eight centuries old, still standing in its valley like it has nowhere else to be. Inside it is all timber and shadow. Outside, the mountains were getting serious.

The fjord day is the one I will remember longest. A viewpoint in the morning where the water lay far below like poured glass. Then the cruise from Gudvangen to Flam, through Naeroyfjord, the narrow one, where the cliffs rise straight out of the water on both sides and waterfalls fall the whole way down without touching anything. A tiny white church sat alone on the shore, and I wondered who its congregation is, and how they get there. In the afternoon we took the Flam Railway up the valley, one of the steepest train lines in the world, and it stopped midway at a waterfall, Kjosfossen, just so we could all get down and get wet taking photographs. The Norwegians understand drama.

Bergen was next, the old Hanseatic wharf at Bryggen leaning gently after five hundred years, the fish market loud and busy, the city park blazing with roses. Even the manhole covers in Bergen say BERGEN, in case you forget where you are. Then a day at sea on the coastal ferry to Stavanger, watching the wake stretch out behind us and little red and white villages slide past on the skerries. Nobody talked much. Nobody needed to.

Stavanger gave us the wildest morning of the trip. They dressed all sixteen of us in bright red survival suits, put us in a speedboat, and ran us out into Lysefjord, flat out, spray flying, cliffs a thousand feet high on either side. Goats stood on ledges that have no business holding goats. Waterfalls dropped straight into the sea. We came back soaked and grinning. In the afternoon we stood under the three giant bronze swords at Hafrsfjord, planted in the rock to mark a battle fought in the year 872, and then wandered the white wooden lanes of Gamle Stavanger, all cobbles and flower boxes. A full day, that one.

Oslo closed the trip. The City Hall with its twin towers and great clock, the National Theatre, the long promenade, and in the evenings the waterfront at Aker Brygge, where we watched Akershus Fortress across the harbour and the ferries come and go, and a seagull on the pier watched us back with considerable suspicion. On the last day, at the airport, one of us found a Game of Thrones throne and sat on it. After eleven days of boats and coaches and trains, he had earned it.

What stays with me is not the monuments. It is the water. Stockholm built on it, the fjords carved by it, the ferries working it, the waterfalls showing off in it. Scandinavia in July is twenty hours of daylight and water everywhere, and a group of friends in red survival suits laughing like schoolchildren.

The soul came home happy.

HPRD

#Scandinavia #Sweden #Norway #TravelDiaries #Fjords #Stockholm #Bergen #Oslo #FlamRailway #TravelBlog #HPRD

KODAWARI NOTES: The 2 Reasons Owners Are Calling Consultants Again. And What the World Pays Them.

I spent thirty years inside hotels, from waiter to general manager, across the Maldives, Seychelles, Indonesia and my own India. These days I sit on the owner's side of the table as a consultant. And I can tell you the phone has not been this busy in years.

It isn't just my phone. Market researchers put hospitality management consulting at six to twelve billion US dollars a year now, growing seven to nine percent annually. Hotel asset management alone was a seven-billion-dollar business in 2025. Owners are paying for outside advice at a level I have never seen before.

So why is this happening? Two reasons, and they explain almost every call I get.

1. The margins have gone tight. Labor is the biggest line in any hotel P&L, wages keep climbing, and in the big Western markets RevPAR has gone flat at exactly the wrong time. Owners want someone who has actually run a floor to come in, look at the roster, the workflow, the purchasing, and find the money hiding in plain sight. When the easy growth stops, efficiency is the only growth left.

2. Owners want their own man at the table. For years the brand marked its own homework and the owner nodded along. That era is ending. Higher interest rates and post-pandemic debt have raised the stakes on every asset, and owners now sit across from operators asking for performance tests, straight answers on centralised costs, and fair exit terms. They bring someone who has sat on both sides of that table. I know, because increasingly that someone is me.

And what does all this cost? Here are the honest numbers from the market.

Senior hospitality consultants bill anywhere from a hundred to five hundred dollars an hour. Asset management retainers typically run half to three-quarters of a percent of revenue. A full turnaround or pre-opening engagement can run into six figures. Now compare that with what owners pay their management companies every single year - two to four percent of revenue plus eight to twelve percent of gross operating profit. Seen that way, a good consultant pays for himself many times over.

The other question I get is what consultants actually deliver these days. In 2026, half the answer is technology and AI. Here is what it looks like on the ground, department by department:

3. Front office. AI-assisted check-in, digital keys, guest messaging by chat. The queues shrink, and your people stop typing registrations and start welcoming guests.

4. Housekeeping. Smart scheduling assigns rooms by live checkout patterns instead of a printed board. I have watched this give back an hour per attendant, per day.

5. Revenue. AI pricing and demand forecasting used to belong to the big chains. Now a thirty-room boutique can price with the confidence of a flagged hotel, using tools that cost less than a part-timer.

6. F&B. Menu engineering software and AI inventory forecasting go after the two quiet drains in every kitchen - waste and idle stock.

7. Engineering. Sensors and smart building systems trim energy, usually the second-largest controllable cost, by ten to twenty percent. Predictive maintenance means the boiler doesn't pick a full-house weekend to give up.

8. HR and admin. Rostering, onboarding, compliance tracking - the software carries the paperwork so managers can do the one thing it can't. Walk the floor and lead people.

A word of caution before you hire anyone, and I say this as one of the people being hired. Pay for outcomes, not documents. Agree the deliverables before the engagement starts - the GOP number, the labor cost per occupied room, the energy saving - and hold us to them. A consultant who won't be measured has already been paid too much. Eighty pages of recommendations nobody implements is not advice. It's typing.

The pattern behind all of this is simple. Owners have realised the expertise they were told only the brands had is available to them directly, and it answers to them alone. That's not a trend. That's a correction, and it's overdue.

Technology carries the repetitive load. Your people carry the guest. Get that balance right, and the soul of the hotel stays happy. So does the P&L.

HPRD

#Hospitality #HotelManagement #AssetManagement #HotelOwners #Consulting #HotelTechnology #AIinHospitality #RevenueManagement #Leadership #IndependentHotels

KODAWARI NOTES: The Management Contract Is Finally Growing Up. Owners, Don't Waste This Moment.

The Economic Times carried a story this week that made me smile into my morning chai. Hotel management contracts in India, it said, are becoming "more even." Owners are negotiating harder on performance benchmarks, capital expenditure, data responsibilities and exit rights. Operators are offering key money and brand-standard freezes. Lawyers who draft these agreements say the blanket indemnities that once protected operators are being narrowed, and in several cases removed entirely.

After thirty years of running boutique and independent hotels across the Maldives, the Seychelles, Indonesia and India, and now sitting firmly on the owner's side of the table as a consultant, let me tell you: this shift was not gifted to owners. It was earned. And it will only last as long as owners behave like they deserve it.

Why is it happening? Simple arithmetic. Every global and Indian chain has announced plans to double its portfolio by 2030. Flags need buildings, and buildings belong to owners. When the operator needs your asset more than you need their brand, the balance of power moves. That window is open right now. It will not stay open forever.

So what should an owner actually do with this moment? Here is what I tell every client who sits across from me.

One: the performance test is the whole game. Everything else is decoration. Insist on a real one. If the operator misses an agreed RevPAR index or GOP threshold for two consecutive years, with a fair cure period, you should be able to terminate without paying out the remaining years of fees. An operator who truly believes in their brand will sign this. One who hesitates has told you something important.

Two: follow the centralised costs. This is where profit quietly leaks. Central reservation systems, loyalty programmes, marketing contributions, shared services. Demand line-item transparency, annual caps, and audit rights. I have seen hotels where these charges, added up, rivalled the management fee itself. Most owners never check.

Three: capex is your money, so act like it. Brand-standard refreshes will come, but negotiate a capex calendar at the start rather than a surprise renovation demand in year four. The brand-standard freezes operators are now offering are worth real money. Get them in writing.

Four: consider the franchise route honestly. Domestic chains moving toward franchise structures is the most interesting part of this story. If you have a competent general manager and a stable team, franchise can be the better economic answer. You keep the upside and the control. But be honest with yourself about your bench strength. A flag without an operator behind it means you own every mistake alone.

Five: and here is the option almost nobody talks about. If you own a smaller property, you do not need a brand name at all. Hand the management to a specialist - an operations consultant who runs your hotel against commonly agreed deliverables: occupancy, GOP, guest scores, staff retention. Not brand standards written in a head office far away, but numbers you and the specialist agree on together. You keep the upside, you keep the control, and season by season you build your own name instead of renting someone else's flag. I have watched small owner-run hotels hold their own against the big flags on exactly this model.

Six: signing the contract is the beginning, not the end. A beautifully negotiated agreement does not run a hotel. Read the monthly P&L like it owes you money, because it does. Ask the uncomfortable questions in owner review meetings. Asset management is not a quarterly email. It is a discipline.

One caution. A lawyer quoted in the piece said something wise: the result today is not an owner-friendly contract but a more negotiated, asset-specific one. Exactly right. Do not walk into these talks trying to win. Walk in trying to build a partnership where both sides make money when the hotel performs, and both sides feel it when it does not. The best contracts I have seen are the ones nobody ever had to enforce, because the incentives were honest from day one.

For years, owners signed operator-drafted contracts with little room to negotiate. Those days are ending. If you own a hotel, or you are building one, this is your moment to sit at the table with your eyes open and your numbers ready.

Use it well. And when the contract is signed, the hotel is running, and the P&L is honest, that is when this business makes you soul happy.

HPRD