Keri Brown is the Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Lights On, a company that helps independent hotels maximize revenue through expert pricing, distribution, and digital marketing strategies. Throughout her career, Keri has held senior roles at major hospitality brands, including Marriott, Hilton, and Highgate, as well as her most recent position as Area Director of Commercial Strategy at Outrigger. She is recognized as one of Hawaii's most decorated commercial strategy leaders, known for bridging the gap between operations, sales, and revenue management to drive holistic hotel performance.
Keri Brown, VP of Commercial Strategy at Lights On, breaks down how independent hotels can compete with branded properties by integrating revenue management, distribution, and digital marketing under one commercial strategy. She explains why a tech stack audit is always the first step with a new client and how OTA partnerships, done right, become a pipeline for direct bookings.
Keri spent over a decade in Hawaii hospitality before joining Lights On. At Outrigger, she led commercial strategy across the Waikiki Collection and played a central role in the $30-40M repositioning of the Waikiki Beachcomber from an IHG property to an independent brand. That project meant rebuilding rate strategy, channel mix, and brand positioning from scratch while the hotel stayed operational. She compares the commercial strategy leader's role to Tim Cook running Apple's supply chain: you may not be the public face, but nothing works without you.
The conversation gets specific about where independent hotels lose revenue. Keri talks about properties running disconnected systems where the PMS doesn't talk to the channel manager, rate updates take hours instead of minutes, and no one is tracking true cost of acquisition by channel. She argues that fixing those connections often matters more than any single pricing decision.
On OTAs, Keri is direct: they were built for independent hotels that don't have a global brand driving demand. The play is to use them for visibility, then convert those guests to direct bookings on the next stay. She also makes a case for front-desk upsell programs, pointing out that a property with 15 different room categories has real margin sitting in upgrades and add-ons that most hotels never capture because operations staff aren't trained or incentivized to sell.
"Revenue is the quarterback. They're the closest to all of the information, and they're the first ones to really see those indicators very early." — Keri Brown
"OTAs were developed for the independent hotels because they didn't have a global brand behind them. Why not use them for what that is and get that visibility?" — Keri Brown
"One instrument can be optimized and doing everything that it's supposed to do. But without the other ones, it's not fully there yet. And the goal is to be fully there." — Keri Brown
"Every OTA guest that comes in — and my OTA partners are going to kill me for saying this — but the truth of the matter is every OTA guest has the opportunity to be a direct guest of the future." — Keri Brown
"If there's anything that I've learned over the course of my career, the only thing that you can predict is change. And you have to learn to adapt to it. That's what commercial strategy is — continually adapting." — Keri Brown
This episode is sponsored by Lights On.
Lights On helps hotels grow revenue more consistently by managing pricing, distribution, and digital marketing together.
We help hotels identify new revenue opportunities, so they don't leave money on the table. We also manage the full revenue and marketing operation, enabling the on-the-ground team to focus on the guest experience.
If your hotel needs stronger revenue growth, visit lightson.co to learn more.
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Kin Sio: Welcome back to the Lights On Podcast. I'm Kin Sio, CEO of Lights On and your host today. On this podcast, we share stories from across hospitality about building and growing hotel businesses.
This episode is sponsored by Lights On. Lights On helps hotels grow revenue more consistently by managing pricing, distribution, and digital marketing together. We help hotels identify new revenue opportunities so they don't leave money on the table. We also run the full revenue and marketing operations for you so the team on the ground can stay focused on the guest experience. If your hotel needs more revenue growth, visit lightson.co to learn more.
Our guest today is our very own Keri Brown, Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Lights On. Keri built her entire career in Hawaii hospitality, coming up from Marriott, Hilton, Highgate before rising to the Area Director of Commercial Strategy at Outrigger, where she was named one of HSMAI's 2024 Top 25 Extraordinary Minds in Revenue Optimization and Distribution. She is one of the most decorated commercial strategy leaders working in Hawaii today. Super excited to have Keri today — not just today, but having Keri at Lights On. Welcome to the show, Keri.
Keri Brown: Thanks, boss.
Kin Sio: So good to be the boss. But before we talk shop, I think it's nice to go back to the beginning, the starting point of everything. So you were originally trying to be a lawyer, right? What put you into hospitality?
[02:00]
Keri Brown: Hospitality for me was a big accident. I had decided I didn't want to go to law school and instead found myself moving into business school. Between years one and two of business school, they require an internship. At an absolute loss as to what I wanted to do with this internship, I was lucky enough to have a really good friend that happened to be in the hospitality industry. He was in the learning development field, which is a branch of HR under the Starwood, now Marriott, brand.
So I happened to just say, "Hey, Cori, can you take on an intern?" And he said yes. We kind of started this whole journey with an accidental decision to do that, which has been one of the greatest journeys that I've had the opportunity to be on. So I'm very thankful for that and for Cori, actually.
Kin Sio: Wow. So with all the things that you can do in hospitality, when did you realize commercial strategy, revenue management specifically, was where you wanted to build your career?
Keri Brown: My initial decision to try and get into revenue management was a pragmatic one. With a business degree, I wanted to do something that really spoke to all of the things that I was learning. Revenue management felt like something that was really oriented towards that business degree — really dealt with numbers and strategy in a way that sometimes operations couldn't necessarily facilitate for me.
That being said, I grew up in operations before I was in revenue. I was a guest service manager and a management trainee. So I was fortunate enough to be able to go through all of those departments. But revenue seemed like the smartest transition for me with a business degree to go into. So it didn't really start off as a passion. It was more pragmatic than that, but it really turned into one, which is cool.
[04:52]
Kin Sio: Very interesting that you have that operational background too. What did that experience being on the ground in operations teach you that somebody coming from revenue with a finance background — fully numbers, living through spreadsheets day to day — how did that operations side teach you something that a pure business or finance degree wouldn't?
Keri Brown: I think it is a constant reminder, and I will say that it's a reminder to this day, that running a hotel is a business in totality. When you're looking at the hotel operation and the teams that run that operation, they're truly the heart of the hotel. When you run revenue, yes, it's about revenue and rate and occupancy, but that occupancy really does continue to drive hours for these team members in housekeeping and engineering and at the front desk.
It's a constant reminder that what you do really does have impact on other people's lives, and you want to continue to do it well. It really gives you a purpose that sometimes you don't often find when you're just simply framing a job as making money for other people.
I have a real soft spot in my heart for the operation, how it works, and the leaders that need to run that operation. It's not an easy business. There are a lot of people that are dependent upon the success of these hotels. For me, operations really grounds me in everything that I do, regardless of whether or not I decided to pursue it as a career. It's certainly something that's a constant reminder to continue to want to do well, to do good for other people.
Kin Sio: It is a humbling moment. Being on the team beyond spreadsheets and data analysis, there are real-life consequences when a button is clicked on your computer. Many investors and owners think about owning a hotel as an asset, but the true part is that human aspect — all the operations need the team on the ground to execute. Any decisions lead to consequences, whether from a guest perspective or the team's perspective as well.
Something we at Lights On strongly believe is that we want to take the numbers side, the financial side of things out of the way, really allowing the team on the ground to do their best to deliver that guest experience, which funnels back to the financial performance of a property. Everything comes back full circle. Beyond just the numbers, one thing that attracted having Keri here is just having that principle in how we do everything.
[07:47]
So fast forward. You've been through different brand properties, independents, big groups, small groups — you were even on the OTA side at some point. Quite a variety of experience. Getting to Outrigger, you spent quite a few years there, and that includes some of the major rebranding efforts for some of the iconic properties in Waikiki. Can you walk us through what you actually had to do leading the commercial strategy for that kind of rebrand exercise?
Keri Brown: I think my introduction to Outrigger was actually my introduction into repositioning a property. I started out with Outrigger as the revenue director for the Waikiki Beachcomber, and the Waikiki Beachcomber was going from an IHG property to an independent brand. I think it was probably maybe a week into the full rebranding — the back-end system transitions and cutovers — that I really started with Outrigger.
What I realized really quickly was that in order to reposition a property like that, especially with the expectations that came along with an investment that big — in the $30 to $40 million range — everybody had to be talking to each other. That's something that has really continued to stick with me even to this day: how everybody interacts and making sure that everybody has a singular purpose and everybody's moving in the right direction.
With a brand repositioning like this, that often includes the revenue strategy component, but also marketing, also sales, because we're really stripping away what people understand about this hotel and what it represents and starting to build up something brand new. With the new product comes a new feel for the hotel, a new language for the hotel, the sounds of the hotel. When we first started with "what does this hotel sound like, feel like, taste like, smell like" — all of those things are really essential components to how a guest understood the hotel.
You wouldn't think that always connects with revenue and pricing. But unless a guest really understands what they're purchasing and what they're getting into, they're not going to pay the money for it. So it was really important to connect all those dots and make sure there was a healthy brand identity so that when it came to selling this hotel at a rate premium from what everybody was expecting historically, we were able to do so because people really understood the value of what they were getting.
That translates into how a hotel is sold. We have salespeople for group, for leisure markets, for Asia sales. Making sure that brand identity is percolated through everything the sales organization is doing is so important because it provides consistency. You can't have somebody who has one understanding of the brand and somebody else who has a completely different understanding and expect any sort of continuity.
It's really finding a way to pull all of that through the process. It's a lengthy process — it took far longer than I had ever anticipated. But it's one that needs to happen to successfully reposition a hotel in this way. And we had the great opportunity to do so a number of times. We did Waikiki Beachcomber, then came Outrigger Reef, then came Waikiki Paradise. Right now the company is going through another big reposition with Outrigger Waikiki on Kalakaua. This is a company that continues to reinvent how people experience what Waikiki is, and it's really exciting to be a part of those types of transformations. As you can already tell, I loved and adored my time at Outrigger. It provided me with such a wealth of different types of experiences that I probably couldn't have gotten in other places.
[12:25]
Kin Sio: Before we get to the next part, something you mentioned could be so overlooked by people. It's about aligning teams from different disciplines, talking the same language, having the same common goal. It's something we internally are constantly talking about — challenges that we face working with our clients.
Traditionally, bigger hotel groups separated out the marketing, the revenue, the sales team, the operations team. They all have their own goals and KPIs and their way of interpreting what success looks like. You came in from the revenue discipline and over time got into what we now constantly call commercial strategy rather than just revenue or marketing. What it sounds like is the dream state that you got to through the repositioning exercise at Outrigger. What is missing in the industry? What's making it challenging for everyone to move in that direction?
Keri Brown: I think it's an adaptability thing. It's really taking what we've historically understood as a revenue discipline or a sales discipline or a marketing discipline. Even as we talk about sales and marketing, oftentimes those are lumped into one, but those are two completely separate disciplines with completely separate superpowers that they're able to leverage.
It's really being able to understand how we did things in the past, but be willing to make those changes as we move into the future, because it is changing. And the change isn't necessarily people going further in different directions. The change is requiring further integration.
Like you said, that language you used is really relevant. You have a salesperson, a marketing person, a revenue person. They're in the same revenue strategy meeting, but they're all speaking completely different languages. As somebody in a different discipline, you often are tuning out because the language isn't the same. So it's really finding that similar language that everybody can use to move in the same direction. I think that's oftentimes missing.
We're so set in our ways sometimes. We're so dogmatic about how things need to be for revenue — "this is our lane and we are not going to deviate from our lane." But in the grand scheme of things, rules are also there in some ways to be broken. Sometimes breaking those rules makes things better and more functional. It really leads to further collaboration.
Collaboration is that piece that's really difficult. We can say, "You guys all have the same KPIs, this is your new target." But the difficult part is really getting buy-in from the people. The people part is the complicated aspect of running a team, of building an organization. Once you can achieve that — everybody moving in the same direction, everybody having the same language — it seems like not that much of an uphill battle.
[16:08]
Kin Sio: People tend to forget there's always the science and the art part of commercial strategy and revenue optimization. We always get the myth that revenue optimization people — it's all about the numbers, the black and white, the right and wrong. Many times, coming back to the art — the communication, how you convey that language to people with different disciplines. It's not just about the peers. We're constantly in front of clients, owners, investors, asset managers, and being able to translate that language to people in different headspaces. It's so undervalued compared to purely driving performance and interpreting data. If that message isn't being conveyed and bought into by everyone — the goal, the progress, the execution — everything tends to fall apart.
Keri Brown: The interesting thing is we have all these metrics for gauging performance, but — I was reading Simon Sinek a while back — he talks about how there's metrics for performance, but we really have no healthy metrics to understand how the softer skills are impacting not only revenue, but overall health of the team and team performance.
Those are the things that wind up being the most important — the things that we don't have benchmarks against, that we don't have KPIs against. It's really interesting to try and figure out how we drive performance and levels of trust and all of those things that are really hard to measure, because they wind up being more important oftentimes than the black and white KPIs that we can put out there.
Kin Sio: That makes sense. From that experience at Outrigger — amazing, and nothing easy. Very challenging journey with those big undertakings. It's hard to trade that experience for anywhere else. And at some point, you decided to leave one of Hawaii's most recognized brands to join Lights On, which is a completely different thing — more of a boutique commercial strategy firm for other hoteliers. What made this change make sense for you?
[18:50]
Keri Brown: As I was moving through the last year, year and a half, and really taking stock of what I wanted to do, the idea of Lights On was just so exciting for me. It was a different sort of challenge. It was exercising a different type of muscle than I had been used to at Outrigger.
Outrigger has this special place in my heart because I was there for so long and the teams there were amazing. But when this opportunity came up to find ways of bringing what Outrigger was so good at into an environment of independent hotels who really don't always have the opportunity to have that type of strategy at their disposal — the type of strategy that's often centralized around big brands with a lot of resources — the opportunity to take some of what I've learned and bring that into the independent hotel space, this might not sound the most professional, but it was cool. It felt cool to be able to do that.
When we had the opportunity to talk and connect, it was like, "Wow, this is something fun. It's a new type of challenge for me." And I, if nothing else, love a challenge. I've only been with the company now for about three and a half months at this point. But it's been a lot of fun getting to know clients and really understanding what they have at their disposal right now and how we can find ways of bringing the things that have come along with my experience into their environment and their independent ecosystem. It's cool.
Kin Sio: Through our portfolio, we work with bigger companies, smaller companies, all the way from 300-plus rooms down to something like 12 rooms. To piggyback on what you mentioned — the bigger groups with bigger budgets tend to have the luxury of hiring all the right people in the right disciplines, a full force of marketing, revenue, operations teams. A hotel with 20 or 30 keys will never be able to afford that.
Thinking about the way that we can democratize what the big guys enjoy for the smaller owners and hoteliers — that's the mission of Lights On. Finding a way to make that model work so that the small business owners get to enjoy the same advantages a group with a bigger budget could. There are many consulting firms, strategy firms, marketing agencies out there. I think they all are focused on completing certain tasks. What we at Lights On want to build truly is being that thinking partner — a group of people who really care about the client's success.
In the world of capitalism, how can we actually take what the big guys enjoy and put it on Main Street? It's not just at the Wall Street level anymore. We feel so lucky to have somebody like you join this mission. To me, it's almost like a movement — Robin Hood style — bringing these things to the smaller operators.
[23:26]
Keri Brown: I 100% agree with that. There's so much fun about taking the interconnectedness of the strategy that is afforded to some of the bigger brands — and they're not always executing it at the ideal, but the theory of how interconnected each of these commercial disciplines should and needs to be. You combine that with how we streamline operations, processes, and distribution to make it fit into an independent space.
It's like a puzzle. It's so much fun to constantly try and put the puzzle together, but then continue to optimize it. All of a sudden it goes from a 2D puzzle to a 3D puzzle, and there's a lot of things that can come along with it. It's been such an amazing start to a journey, and I can only imagine where it can go from here.
Kin Sio: Let's try to bring those big concepts into executions and implementations. Walk us through a scenario when we take on a new hotel client. Typically, they come in because things are not going the way they should financially, especially when the current market is not doing the best in terms of tourism and travel. We come in as the trusted partner for a hotel — what do you look at first to understand the problem?
Keri Brown: This has been the most interesting thing about joining Lights On — that process for me has continued to evolve in trying to understand what we need to be looking at initially to find what low-hanging fruit we're aiming for.
It really starts with an understanding. We were talking earlier about how the people thing is really important, but there are very technical aspects of revenue management that can't be extracted. There are very black and white things that we need to look at. For me, as somebody who started their career in revenue management, I really do start with the tech stack — what technologies we're looking at, but more importantly, how those technologies are connected. That's a theme throughout our entire conversation: the interconnectedness of everything. That falls in line with our technology as well.
What connects to what? How are things working? How is the ARI — availability, rates, inventory — flowing throughout each of the systems that run this hotel? Then it's taking a look at all of the rate codes that are built, all of the promotional activity we have out there. We've begun doing what we call a rate audit — basically pulling all of the information from all of the systems and putting it in one centralized spot so that we can really see what we have to work with.
To go in and try to fix something that you don't understand is probably the worst idea in the world. So really taking a look at what is there and what building blocks we have to work with is, for me, the best way to start.
Once we understand that, once I understand how the connection works internally, I can start figuring out how connections work externally, because we have dozens of connections within our systems to outside sources. Making sure we understand those and get how the connection is feeding in and how we can optimize it — it makes no sense to treat a head cold if something is fundamentally wrong with how your blood is flowing to certain organs. It's really important to understand how everything works functionally at the beginning. Then you can start treating all of the symptoms that might not be performing optimally from a sales standpoint.
From a marketing standpoint, for independent hotels that don't have unlimited marketing budgets, it's about leveraging visibility. You leverage visibility by making sure the brand is strong and healthy and the name is out there. But that doesn't mean anything if you have a CTA that you click into and something is broken because nothing is connected the right way. All of those things at the most basic of levels really drive the performance and the KPIs that we're setting forth for sales and marketing. For me, it's starting at the very basic building blocks — technology and rates.
[28:50]
Kin Sio: Let me try to use an analogy, because as we get into this technicality, hoteliers who didn't grow up in this discipline might be thinking, "What are Kin and Keri talking about?"
Think about Apple as a company. Everybody thinks Apple is a product company. Steve Jobs, the legendary founder, created great products — the MacBook, the iPhones. When Tim Cook came in, people said, "Who's this guy? He's not innovative, he doesn't have the same charisma as Steve Jobs." Little did people know that Tim Cook is legendary in a different space. He's the supply chain expert who really 100x'd Apple's profitability. The way he did it was figuring out the optimal way to build a supply chain for manufacturing. You could have the best iPhone ever, but if you don't know how to assemble it, design it, and ship all these parts across the globe, Apple can't be what they are today. The success behind it is really about the supply chain.
That's basically what Keri was just talking about. When we think about selling a hotel as a product to the consumer — how do people discover this product? How do they understand the experience? How do they find it at the right price, at the right time, that will make them actually book? That web of distribution, pricing, and discovery — and now layering marketing and branding on top to make the experience feel compelling — these are all the dark magic of commercial strategy, revenue management, and marketing. When everything works together, that's having a well-run commercial engine for a hotel.
Coming back to what Keri just mentioned, these are all what needs to happen under the hood. For many occasions that we run into, these things are not necessarily difficult. They just need to be intentional. Many hotels, when they first start running, think about providing the best guest experience. They would never think about all these systems, all these OTAs — Expedia, Booking.com, Airbnb. There are ways to configure everything in an optimal way. When everything is optimized — which is the thing that keeps Keri excited every day — that makes a huge difference on how a hotelier can really monetize while providing the best experience ever for their guests.
These are the low-hanging fruit we see hotels miss because it's not intentional. It's knowledge that was kept by the big players for the longest time. Understanding how the tech stack works is a big thing hoteliers tend to miss. Over time, everybody's building Frankenstein. They start with the PMS, then technology vendors come in and say, "Get a channel manager, get on this GDS, get on all these OTAs." Before you know it, a hotel is managing 10, 15, 20 different systems, all talking to each other in suboptimal ways. Coming in and solving the puzzle of connecting all those things more optimally — instantly, anyone can save and earn much more through that process.
Keri Brown: And sometimes it means disconnecting some of those things.
[33:30]
Kin Sio: More concrete example — what was the most common thing that you find owners didn't know was costing them money?
Keri Brown: I think as we're looking at the independent space, one thing the independent world sometimes still struggles with is the understanding of just how important it is for us to work with our third parties as much as with our direct channels. There is absolutely no doubt that optimizing our direct channels is the most profitable way to make revenue in any hotel.
But realistically, what independent hotels struggle with is visibility. They don't have the benefit of a global brand. So to be able to leverage not only the paid direct efforts — and here at Lights On, we're pretty darn good at that, I have to say — we really do a great job of utilizing the tools at our disposal on the direct side to build brand equity within any space.
But oftentimes that's not enough in the global playground that we play in. When you have partners like our OTAs — Priceline, Agoda, Expedia — one thing that we often forget is those aren't just discount channels. They're not just asking for promotions. They're visibility levers. For us to find ways to creatively leverage that without giving away too much on the net rate side, but to leverage those into something that really works for us — not only as a hotel and a revenue stream, but really helps to drive direct bookings through those visibility levers — I think that becomes something that adds icing on the cake with regard to performance.
It's something we don't often think about in the independent space because it's often an "us versus them" sort of thing. "No, we can't play the OTAs because we have to focus on direct." I get it. I understand that. But at the same time, if we start looking at these third parties as partners — and we don't have to choose all of them, we choose the select few that actually work for the brand, that are in alignment with the messaging that we want — to leverage those into something that works for us as a hotel overall, I think is incredibly intelligent to do.
But again, it requires a level of connectivity, a level of understanding between the different platforms and the different strategies that we're working through for those platforms, to find those connections and really make things work to get the best performance we could possibly get.
I think that's one thing I often find — we forget how to use our third parties for what they were developed for. OTAs were developed for the independent hotels because they didn't have a global brand behind them. This gave them that ability. Why not use them for what that is and get that visibility, and help us to drive direct bookings as well?
[37:05]
Kin Sio: Let's continue that contrarian topic, as it gets into our daily conversations with clients — the OTA versus web direct debate. People still tend to think about it as either-or. What you just said, and our principles in general — thinking everything at a global level for a property — our view is pretty contrarian. Yes, direct booking is a top goal. But if we think about that in first principles, all everyone is asking is: how can I acquire incremental net new business at the lowest cost possible?
What we usually find is web direct is not necessarily the cheapest every time. For the most part, probably cheaper. But if we think about all the brand investments, all the paid ads, all the technology fees, maintaining the website at its best state — all of those are oftentimes not factored into the equation. When we build a full picture of cost of acquisition by channel and add up the things people tend not to think about, it surprises many people that OTAs are actually not as expensive as they'd think. Don't get me wrong, they could still be expensive if not being used the right way.
The whole puzzle piece that drives Keri's excitement is that until we look at the full picture and understand how each channel really drives business for a property, it's not a black and white answer. There might be things we can do in a relatively short amount of time to drive new business without signing your life away to OTAs. It's a matter of using these third-party channels the right way versus blindly turning everything on and giving up all the business so the hotel doesn't feel in control. The principle of being able to control, being able to pull the lever as needed — not always on — is a strategy piece we always start with at the beginning of our engagements.
Keri Brown: I agree. It's a really big deal for hotels going through this type of analysis to really understand what their cost of acquisition is — and not just theoretically. In theory, direct is the lowest cost of acquisition channel. But put the numbers behind it. Run the numbers and actually see what those acquisition costs are.
Once you have a really healthy and granular understanding of your cost of acquisition per channel, it really helps to drive what your strategy looks like. Sometimes it's the same strategy, but sometimes it may change based on what you discover with all of these numbers that are realistic for your own hotel. I think it's a really interesting exercise because more and more, it's less about just making sure we get as much top-line revenue as possible. It's more about how we shift those channels in a way that is cost-effective for the hotel at the bottom line. It just makes that strategy more robust when you have that understanding.
[41:20]
Kin Sio: A good exercise for listeners — say we have a silver bullet to get anyone to 100% web direct, no OTA, overnight. You turn off all your OTA channels. Bam, the next day you have 100% web direct. Is anyone willing to do that? Probably not.
So knowing that we all need to depend on these third-party channels to help your property reach more people — it is a necessary evil. If you have to use it anyway, why not find a way to optimize them so you get the best out of it and you have control, not letting them control you?
Everything we mentioned is not a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Because three months from now, things change, seasonality shifts. It makes sense to constantly be looking at that and finding the dynamic optimum mix. Ultimately, all these exercises come back to minimizing the cost of acquiring guests.
Don't be afraid of OTAs. Especially first-time guests — they usually use OTAs because they have a membership there. They book it, come for the first time. Now, hotel, it's your job to wow these guests, to showcase your experience, to showcase what your brand is about. You have all the opportunities to capture these guests and make sure that when they come back next time, they book direct. If somebody is coming back as a repeat guest and they're not booking direct, we have a big problem to deal with.
Keri Brown: Agreed. One thing I learned from my ops mentors is once the guest hits the desk to check in, they're your guest. It's up to you to capture all of their information and really transform that. Every OTA guest that comes in — and my OTA partners are going to kill me for saying this — but the truth of the matter is every OTA guest has the opportunity to be a direct guest of the future.
It's just making sure that you have those strategies in place with the desk and making sure they are aware of just how important it is to capture all of that information and really move the guest over from a third-party booking into a direct guest. It's as simple as that. But it's a strategy that's put into place. It sits outside of the revenue strategy, but it is revenue strategy. It's a way to capture direct guests.
That's how operations continues to participate in the revenue strategy of a hotel — working on converting third-party guests into direct guests. We don't often talk about the TripAdvisors of the world and how important it is for those reviews to come in. Those reviews not only lead to more bookings — hopefully from direct — but they also allow the revenue team the opportunity to increase rates once rankings are higher, because there's more value there.
The ops team is not outside of where the revenue strategy sits. They're smack dab in the middle with everybody else.
[45:48]
Kin Sio: So aside from those topics, what was another example of an underused lever that you see independent hotels sitting on right now that could drive additional revenue?
Keri Brown: A lot of that has to do with how we integrate with our operations team. I've been seeing this often. For the ops teams that we work with here at Lights On, they're tremendous. But as I look back in past lives and try to identify what that integration has historically been between operations and revenue, it's kind of a contentious relationship. We often talk about the contentious relationship between sales and revenue, but operations and revenue sometimes can be that way too.
We get into the situation where you need to oversell a hotel to get a perfect sell. The oversell doesn't wash and all of a sudden ops is absolutely, and rightfully so, mad because now they have guests coming in and we have nowhere to put them.
But the operations team is such an integral part of driving ancillary revenue and different types of channel shifts. We talked about how they can help convert a third-party guest to a direct guest. But you talk about ancillary revenue streams — upsells, early check-in, late check-out, all of those things that require interaction at the front desk. Oftentimes we just kind of leave it to, "OK, if they want to upgrade they can, if not, whatever." But really putting intention behind that — if we have 15 different room categories, which is not outside the realm of possibility for some hotels, really putting marketing behind it and showing people why it would be worth it to upgrade from a city view to an oceanfront.
Pictures speak a thousand words. Why not put it on an iPad and say, "This is what it looks like, this is what you would be getting if you upgraded to an oceanfront." Things like that, just putting that sort of intention behind how you drive an ancillary revenue stream, can often drive a couple of dollars' worth of RevPAR points if you're really doing it right. I think that's one thing that often falls off the radar because there are other things we're dealing with on the revenue side.
That integration, that constant communication with the ops team to really drive revenue in the ancillary fields, is such an important part of things. I saw it really play out, especially at Hilton Hawaiian Village. I was in lockstep with our director of front office, and I would be down there every other day talking to the front desk team about the importance of upsells and why we were selling the way we were selling, because we needed them to get to those revenue streams.
You would be absolutely blown away by what the front desk is able to do when given a strategy and told, "Hey, I support you. I think you can do whatever you need to do. I have your back. Let's see what we can get." That team was tremendous in achieving that. I was stoked to see the results, and they were stoked too. That's a big thing — they were stoked as well.
[50:13]
Kin Sio: It reminds me of the experience in Las Vegas — people coming to the front desk, trying to do the secret $20 bill flag in the card holder to get that upgrade. Now thinking about it from a hotel perspective, how much missed revenue and upsell opportunity could be on the P&L? These are solid examples of when operations is thinking about commercial strategy. Every discipline has a role to play. When the operations team is well trained and aligned with what's important, when they're trained the right way to produce some of those upsell opportunities, there's so much that hoteliers can implement. It's not overnight, but you can definitely start today.
So last question to wrap us up. I'm going to hold you to something you said back in 2019.
Keri Brown: Oh, come on.
Kin Sio: Back then, you believed that revenue management is the future of hospitality. Now with everything we've mentioned — the transition where we're talking a lot more about commercial strategy versus just revenue strategy — how has your mindset shifted? And what do you think is still missing?
Keri Brown: Are you asking me if I thought I was wrong or right?
Kin Sio: I'll let you interpret that.
Keri Brown: Clearly, I'm going to say I was right. But I think I was wrong and I was right. The rise of revenue management is unquestionable. It's a discipline that has evolved so heavily over the course of the last decade, decade and a half. My former chief commercial officer, Shandi, put it in the best way: revenue is the quarterback. They're the closest to all of the information. They're the first ones to really see those indicators very early.
Revenue has become so inextricably linked with hotel performance that it's hard to say it's not one of the most important things. But as I've moved into different realms of the commercial world, it's not the end-all-be-all. You can have a revenue team that sees and notices all of the indicators coming through, but they really have to know what to do with that. They have to know how to communicate with the teams that drive visibility and partnership relationships, and the timing of all of those different things.
For me, it's the commercial engine that is really going to drive overall hotel performance. The more it's optimized, the better it is. But that involves all of the commercial disciplines. I don't leave out distribution, because distribution is an essential part — it's the building blocks of all the things we do as a commercial engine.
All of those things working together in concert. If you want to talk about 2019, we can go back to 2010. I was doing my management trainee interview with the Starwood team, and they asked me what my favorite sound was. I told them that my favorite sound was a symphony, because one instrument sounds beautiful when played expertly — it's an amazing thing. But all of these instruments played together, play beautifully. There's really no comparison.
The same holds true for commercial strategy. One instrument can be optimized and doing everything that it's supposed to do. But without the other ones, it's not fully there yet. And the goal is to be fully there.
Have I perfected the way it looks and feels and sounds? Absolutely not. Got to be kidding — it's so complicated. But it doesn't mean we don't keep trying. We have to keep trying, we have to keep optimizing. If there's anything that I've learned over the course of my career, it's that the only thing you can predict is change. And you have to learn to adapt to it. That's what commercial strategy is — continually adapting. The sooner you buy into that, the better off you'll be.
[54:40]
Kin Sio: And it's a core principle of how Lights On operates too. Change is the only constant in the world nowadays, especially with every advancement in AI that we're seeing right now. We are constantly talking about bringing AI workflows — not just at the level of asking ChatGPT questions, but building that into how we look at data, how we streamline our operations. We've started doing some of these projects that are actually awesome. Even our show — a lot of the structure and all that is powered by AI to have really deep questions and discussions.
Finding ways to constantly grow, learn the latest things, and apply those for our hotel clients — that's the other big aspect. Everything you're listening to right now, maybe three months from now, six months from now, everything changed again. We'll probably have to do another episode talking about the new changes. Keri's not going to like it because I'm dragging her through this podcast, but it's so true.
This is the platform we want to build — always providing the latest and greatest, not just the stories from the past, but the trends for the future and how we can capitalize on them and turn that into success and victories for our clients. I just want to wrap the show with that.
Keri Brown: Love it.
Kin Sio: If everyone wants to listen to more insights like this, follow and subscribe to our show, the Lights On Podcast. If you want to learn about what we do as a company or have a conversation with us, go to lightson.co. Keri, thanks so much for hopping on.
Keri Brown: Thanks, boss.
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