How to Run a Hotel with Rishu Chaitanya

Most hotels don't fail because the rooms are bad, or the location is wrong, or the market has dried up.

They fail — or quietly under-perform for years — because no one ever sat down and answered the basic questions properly. What is this hotel actually trying to be?

Who is it really competing with?

Where, precisely, is the money supposed to come from, and where is it actually leaking out?

I wrote this book for owners, general managers and operators who are tired of running a hotel on instinct, inherited habits and whatever the last consultant recommended. It is built around a simple belief: a hotel is not a building with rooms in it.

It is an integrated business system — strategy, pre-opening discipline, daily operations, revenue and distribution, finance and controls, people and culture, guest experience, marketing, and continuous improvement — nine engines that either pull together or quietly work against each other.

Each chapter in this book stands on its own. You can read it front to back as a complete operating philosophy, or jump straight to the engine that's failing you today.

Either way, the goal is the same: fewer opinions, more system.

Fewer fires, more foresight.

Let's get into it.