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Anders Johansson

146 posts
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  • 4 min

How to Rebuild RM Around Profit, Decisions, and the Guest

📈 Kill #1: The role of Revenue Managers (RMs) should transition from spreadsheet tasks to strategic roles by creating two distinct tracks: Commercial Strategy Lead and Revenue/Profit Systems Lead. Quick wins include publishing role charts and launching a rotation plan. Kill #2: Eliminate strategy sprawl by using a single Hotel Strategy Kernel. Replace weekly revenue meetings with a Commercial Action Cadence. Kill #3: Focus on decision briefs over storytelling. Kill #4: Implement a Guest-First Operating Model to enhance pricing power.
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  • 3 min

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Analytics: How to Drive Real Insights

📈 Top-down analytics is crucial for monitoring business health via KPIs on dashboards, spotting trends, and identifying anomalies. Yet, it risks analysis paralysis. Bottom-up analytics solves specific issues by focusing on critical business objectives like reducing churn by 15%. Effective organizations create a synergistic loop, using top-down to identify issues and bottom-up to diagnose and solve them. This flywheel approach requires a robust business intelligence system to drive improvements.
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  • 4 min

Guest-First Leadership: The New Role of the GM

🏨 GM roles have evolved from generalists to specialists, creating silos and fragmented KPIs. While sales, marketing, revenue, and finance focus on their areas, guest experience lacks a single owner. A "Journey Owner" GM is crucial for integrating experience and profitability. They attract, capture, prepare, deliver, and review to enhance NPS, repeat intent, and revenue per guest. Aligning specialists under a GM ensures consistent delivery and profitable loyalty by orchestrating the guest experience.
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  • 2 min

Why Do Guests Still Hate Check-In? A Frank Conversation.

🛅 Check-in processes at hotels can be frustrating. Guests often face lengthy waits without clear reasons and are required to provide information that the hotel already has. Repeated requests for credit card details for deposits create distrust. The initial experience becomes overwhelming with excessive information delivered at once. Ideal check-ins should take under 60 seconds, using pre-filled forms and digital keys when possible, enhancing the feeling of being welcomed rather than processed.
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  • 6 min

Your Hotel Isn’t a Tech Company, but it’s Time to Act Like One.

📈 Hotel leaders face internal friction due to data chaos, causing flawed decision-making. Disconnected systems like PMS, M&E, RMS, and POS create data silos. A true Hotel BI platform resolves these issues through automated, multi-source data integration, interactive dashboards, and forward-looking analysis. It empowers leadership, commercial teams, and operations with comprehensive insights for proactive strategy and improved guest satisfaction. Adopting a unified BI platform fosters organizational alignment, turning data into a critical asset for sustainable profitability.
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  • 6 min

Stop Managing Siloes. Start Staging the Guest Journey.

🏨 The article outlines a five-stage action plan to enhance the guest experience: ATTRACT, CAPTURE, PREPARE, DELIVER, and REVIEW. It emphasizes using cross-functional "pods" for each stage: Storytelling, Conversion, Experience, and Loyalty. Key metrics include brand search volume, direct booking share, pre-arrival upsell revenue, TRevPAR, and Customer Lifetime Value. Success relies on leadership, technology, and talent, focusing on data-driven decisions and AI to optimize and personalize guest interactions. The goal is seamless guest journeys for long-term profitability and loyalty.
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  • 5 min

Two Models for Organizing Your Hotel’s Commercial Team

📈 Model 1 unites Marketing, Sales, and Revenue Management under a Commercial Director, aligning goals and fostering collaboration. It delivers quick financial gains like immediate RevPAR improvements but risks creating new silos and overlooking guest experiences. Model 2 centers on guest journeys, enhancing loyalty and lifetime value, but requires a versatile leader and may dilute expertise. Both models rely on Hotel Business Intelligence systems for data-driven decisions. Choose based on your hotel's size and focus.
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  • 3 min

AI Won’t Replace Revenue Managers—But It Will Expose the Weak Ones

💻 Revenue managers, September 2025, AI revolutionizes tasks by automating competitor rate checks, report generation, and inventory updates. The focus shifts to strategic planning with Total Revenue Management, leveraging BI tools for profitability and guest-centric management. By utilizing AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT, managers can innovate and integrate technology with hotel strategies. Emphasis on storytelling, leadership, and creative problem-solving remains key. Future-proofing involves embracing AI to transition from tactical to strategic roles.
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  • 10 min

Create a sense of belonging: How to build a hotel brand that lasts

🏨 Explore the five critical phases of a hotel guest journey—Attract, Capture, Prepare, Deliver, and Review—to build a distinct atmosphere. Mega-brands use big data for precise targeting, while independents leverage authentic stories. Global chains like Marriott and Hilton employ sophisticated CRM and loyalty ecosystems, ensuring efficiency and consistency. Independents focus on personal connections and authenticity. Success lies in crafting experiences that transform first-time guests into loyal community members.
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