Josiah: Benchmarking is interesting. I’ve had a lot of conversations in the past couple of days about this. Obviously, since COVID, it’s been hard to do comparisons. And I think on the most simple level, how would you encourage our listeners to think about benchmarking in a world where someone might say, hey, it feels like every year, every month, things are so different. How do I even think about benchmarking in that sort of climate?
Amanda: Yeah. Well, I think number one, the golden rule, what’s most important about benchmarking is not so much the number that you’re seeing, but the consistency and that you are tracking the same way. You’ve got consistent methodology because we have great debates about reporting and who’s including and excluding and what it is. And the important part is the consistency and that it’s treated the same way every day, every week, every month. So I think fundamentally, that’s what’s important about benchmarking. And for us, benchmarking is about market share. So you’re trying as a business to make sure you’re tracking and growing your market share, and that’s why you need benchmarking. So for me, how do you make sense of the noise? I spend a lot of time thinking about the forecast. This year in particular, I’m like, every year can’t be ‘this has never happened before.’ But that’s what it feels like every month. We’ve never experienced this. And I think where I sit today, I find some comfort in the, this is the industry, right? This is, you are adapting. So I think that’s where the consistency of what you know, what you’re tracking is important because you’re just adapting to the market, to the world changes, to the economic changes, whatever it is, there are a lot of things that are out of our control. And I think benchmarking brings to light what you are consistently tracking that you can pull the levers on to help grow your market share for your business.
Josiah: You have to focus on that. I mean, that’s what you have to do in these rapidly changing worlds.
Amanda: The rapidly changing world is the noise that can send you in a spiral and staying strong in what you know and grounding yourself in that analysis on a consistent basis has to keep you out of the spiral of up or down. I mean, certainly this year, I’ve had to make sure I pull myself out of the, don’t go into the world’s coming to an end view. So.
Josiah: I want to just underscore something you mentioned earlier, I thought was insightful in the sense of market share. I think on the panel that you were leading this morning with Ben Rafter, the CEO of Hotel Equities, he was talking about in this environment where if demand is not expanding, then the only way to grow is by taking share from your competitors, right? And so I think if you think across the hotel business from the commercial side to all the levers you can pull for performance, that’s the path for growth maybe in the months ahead. It’s competitive growth. It’s taking market share, but you need a way to understand that.
Amanda: That is 100% correct because overall demand in hotels in the U.S. is not growing. I mean, I started out by saying we’ve revised the demand forecast down to -0.1%. Demand’s not growing in the U.S. this year. So we don’t have new demand to bring in to the property. So it’s a street corner business. It’s you are trying to just shift demand from your competitor next door into your hotel. And how do you do that?
