Dan Wacksman is the Founder and CEO of Sassato LLC and Hawaii Hotel Hui, where he leverages decades of expertise to help hotel clients make strategic decisions and execute on marketing, distribution, and technology projects. Under his leadership, Hawaii Hotel Hui has grown into a key industry platform, reaching over 4,000 hospitality professionals across the Hawaiian Islands. With over 20 years of global experience spanning the US and Asia, Dan is recognized for his in-depth knowledge of hotel commercial strategy, tech stacks, and fostering local industry communities.
Most hotels lose margin in the same places: OTA rate discipline, tech stack bloat, misaligned KPIs, and weak direct booking conversion. Dan Wacksman has worked both sides — 20 years in travel distribution, then 12 as SVP of Marketing and Distribution at Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, and now running Sassato LLC out of Honolulu. Kin Sio sits down with Dan on The Lights On Podcast to break down what independent hotels consistently get wrong — and what it takes to fix it.
Dan’s OTA position is direct: the relationship works when managed with rate discipline. His rule — never give an OTA a better rate than your direct channels — sounds obvious, but he still walks into properties that violate it. The fix starts at the front desk. When an OTA guest checks in, that’s the moment to collect contact information, build a direct relationship, and make sure the next booking doesn’t go back through Expedia or Booking.com. As Dan puts it: “I am happy to get OTA bookings as long as the second time they book me, it’s direct.”
The ROAS trap catches a lot of hotel marketing teams. A campaign with 20-to-1 return on ad spend looks like the obvious winner — until you realize it’s brand search, capturing demand that already exists. The 5-to-1 campaign might be more valuable: a net-new customer who wasn’t in your consideration set until you bought that ad. Incremental reach, not recapture. On the tech side, Dan has audited dozens of commercial tech stacks and has never left without finding enough savings to cover his fees — unused contracts, overlapping tools, and auto-renewing agreements with 90-day notice windows that operators didn’t know were rolling into three-year terms.
Hawaii Hotel Hui started as a lead gen experiment. Dan expected 300 subscribers — a way to stay visible to his consulting network. Within months it had grown to a few thousand. It now reaches over 4,000 hospitality professionals across the islands, with vendors actively competing for sponsorship spots. He closes with a candid take on Hawaii’s market: 79% occupancy and $322 ADR would make most mainland operators envious, but RevPAR growth is roughly 2.5% while costs keep rising faster. Direct revenue and cost control are where independent operators need to focus over the next two years.
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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[00:00]
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 operation so the team on the ground can stay focused on the guest experience. If your hotel needs smart revenue growth, visit lightson.co to learn more.
My guest today, super well-known on the island, Dan Wacksman, founder and CEO of Sassato LLC and Hawaii Hotel Hui, a platform for hoteliers here in Hawaii. Dan spent 12 years as a Senior Vice President of Marketing and Distribution at Outrigger Hotels and Resorts. And before that, ran big operations across Asia. He actually spent over a decade in Asia running different travel companies. He now consults with independent hotels on commercial strategy, technology, and distribution. And of course his latest project, Hawaii Hotel Hui, a platform for hoteliers in Hawaii now reaching over 4,000 people across the islands.
Dan, welcome to the show.
Dan Wacksman: Hello again, thank you so much for having me.
Kin Sio: You have such a long history in hospitality. So we’re going to do a little time machine back to where everything started. Back then, I think just from your website, you kind of started this world in hospitality from training people in Honolulu at a call center at CheapTickets.com. How was the journey from there all the way to now, where at some point you were in Asia managing big companies, big corporations, 400 employees at some point? What was that evolution like?
Dan Wacksman: I think my career can be explained by a lot of lucky accidents and coincidences. And one was, out of college, I decided to move to Japan for a while and I lived there for a few years. I wanted to move somewhere else after spending some time in Japan and I decided to come to Hawaii.
My background in Japan was I was doing a lot of training and development. So I got a job training new staff to sell air tickets. It was interesting, they were using native Sabre back in the day, not even a web GUI at that time. I was lucky enough that that was right at the start of the internet revolution. We put an internet front end on our website and things just kind of blew up from there.
Because I was young, because I was ambitious, because I was interested, I learned a lot about the website side of the business. And from that point on, I kind of became the web guy and that was sort of a lucky break for me. From there, our company got acquired by a big mainland company and they moved me out into my next roles from there.
Kin Sio: From there, your responsibility really just kept growing. Was there a moment you realized you could handle the scale of responsibility?
Dan Wacksman: The scale of, sorry?
Kin Sio: The responsibility. Just from getting into the industry over time, taking more on, to a point where just the more people you manage, the scale of responsibility kind of really changed dramatically. Was there a moment that you realized you could handle that?
Dan Wacksman: I don’t know if there was a single moment that I could handle it, because it was sort of gradual. When I was in Japan, I started by just being an individual contributor, then I managed a small team, then a larger team, and eventually I managed a region. So it just compounded and I never stopped to think about was it scaling and can I handle the scaling.
[05:00]
I think probably from a management perspective, my biggest challenge was managing in different cultures and figuring out how to work with people. Whether it be mainland China, Japan, or even here in Hawaii, we have a unique culture here. It’s not like the rest of the continental US. So you have to learn how to adapt to that. To me, that was more difficult than the overall how do you manage people, but managing in different environments.
Kin Sio: Especially where we are in Hawaii, just with that diversity of culture, I think that really became an advantage for you. Speaking of your time in Asia, I know you definitely spent lots of time in China. We’ve talked a few times about that. When you were there, that was before you were on the hotel operation side of things. You were more on the distribution OTA side and you literally built one of China’s largest OTAs back then. How did that time on the OTA side shape how you think about distribution?
Dan Wacksman: I was most recently a hotel person and now if you add up all the years, I’ll probably have 20 years on the hotel side of the business. But the previous 20 years before that was more in travel tech, travel distribution in that area. And I think they all meld really well together. Just understanding how travel is booked, all of the pipes that are necessary to be able to make those bookings and how to optimize that is extremely important. No matter what side of the business you’re on, you really need to understand that.
I was lucky enough to be involved in the early days of the OTA, to see them from when they were tiny to these huge companies that are really pushing through a lot of hotel bookings and travel bookings. I can understand how they developed and why they developed and also how to manage your own business to have them be an asset and not a detriment.
A lot of people look at OTAs and to be honest, I was known as the big anti-OTA guy. I would speak at conferences and talk about all the bad things the OTAs were doing. But the reality of it is they could be a really good partner. You just need to manage it appropriately. Sometimes they could be not a great partner, and then you need to call them out on that. But for the most part, if you manage it in the right way, it’s an important distribution channel for all hotels.
Kin Sio: It’s funny you mentioned that you were very anti-OTA, which we all know is a constant conversation, that frenemy relationship between hotels and OTAs. I actually saw an article and a talk that you did, it was a while back. I want to see if it’s still relevant today. You did this presentation called “Do OTAs Suck?” You actually spent lots of time talking about OTAs and how to work with them, how to optimize them. That’s always that frenemy relationship. So with all that time, and because I think that speech was a few years ago, how do you think about that relationship right now, and what are hotels consistently getting wrong, like not getting the best out of the frenemies?
[10:00]
Dan Wacksman: My answer now is the same answer it was back then. I wanted to get people’s attention so I titled it, my first slide was “Do OTAs Suck?” and it got people’s attention, right? They weren’t looking at their phones. They were looking at what’s this guy going to say. So my answer at the end was, it depends.
They can suck or they can be very, very good for you. If you are managing them well and you’re not giving them better rates than you have on your own website and you’re not participating in deals that undercut your own website or your other partners, then that’s a good situation. On the other hand, on the OTA side, when they’re discounting your rates lower than your offering, that’s not a good relationship either.
So I think it needs to be balanced and they could be good partners. But the one thing I always say, it’s a mantra and it’s amazing that I still need to say it 10, 20 years later — never give an OTA a better rate than you have on your direct channels. Yet you constantly find people doing that. And that’s when you’re not using it the way you should use it.
Kin Sio: Why is it so hard to get it right? Because I think in theory, everything you mentioned people won’t disagree with, but we still see a lot of these rate parity problems that constantly just can’t get resolved. What do you see? Is there a common pattern that can be fixed?
Dan Wacksman: I wish there was an easy answer to that. There are all sorts of parity violations that happen. More often than not, it’s a bad actor using a net opaque rate and using that rate in a way that they’re not supposed to. And often it’s three layers deep. So the only way to find out who’s actually behind that rate is to book it and then see how it comes into your system. There are tools now that enable you to get a little bit deeper than that, but it’s still not as easy as it should be.
That’s straight undercutting. There’s also discounted undercutting, which always drove me nuts. Even with the good players, not the bad player OTAs, but with Expedia and Booking.com, they’ll do self-funded discounts — 20% off on this rate. Yet if you do it on your own website, you get a parity violation. So it’s tough and you’ve got to figure out when you need to push back, when you need to do deep research to find out who’s undercutting you. But it’s still not easy.
You would think by now with all these great tools and AI that it would be easy to solve for, but our disparate distribution systems and the downstream users of your rates — it’s very hard to unravel sometimes.
Kin Sio: Especially in our market here right now, it’s fascinating to see how nothing is black and white. A good example here is, to make OTAs really work for you, especially on the islands here, OTA market managers tend to keep very close relationships with the hotel operators, much more than what I would see on the mainland. Thinking about it from the shoe of a hotel operator, what does a healthy OTA relationship actually look like in practice? And obviously it could be different from what we have here on the islands in Hawaii versus the mainland. Is there a good practice or pattern that people should follow?
Dan Wacksman: OTAs have amazing reach. They can, especially if you’re a smaller brand or an independent brand, you’re never going to get the reach that they get. People are coming into that funnel who’ve never heard of you before. So you need to optimize that and you need to work hard and make sure that your displays, your images, and your content is all up to date.
I think both Booking and Expedia have scores that they give you of your content. You want to make sure that your content is absolutely great. You want to make sure that you’re as high up as you can be without paying for it. Sometimes you have to pay for it, but as high up in the sort order as you can get by doing the things you do naturally, like optimizing the content.
And then you need to accept the fact that a lot of people are going to come in through that channel. But what I think is extremely important, and it used to be something I used to tell my team, is I am happy to get OTA bookings as long as the second time they book me, it’s direct. They should never go back to the OTA a second time once we’ve built a relationship with them.
[15:00]
What does that mean? When the OTAs book you, they don’t give you their email address, they don’t give you their information. You can’t market to them. But when they come to that front desk, you need to be getting that information from them. You need to build that direct relationship with them so that the next time they’re coming to your destination, you’re top of mind, you’re in their email inbox, you’re sending them cool content about the destination that builds that relationship over time, maybe they’ve liked you or followed you on social media. Those are the things we need to do. And there’s no reason the second booking should be through Expedia.
Sometimes it is because you haven’t built that relationship, or sometimes it is because they’re offering lower or better rates than you, which is what we talked about earlier.
Kin Sio: Any good practices at the front desk level, just making sure hotel operations can make sure that the second booking happens through direct?
Dan Wacksman: It has to be a collaboration between operations and marketing in order to ensure that they’re able to collect their information at the front desk easily. You don’t want to increase check-in time. You don’t want to make it more difficult for the front desk than it already is. They should have the tools needed to quickly collect that information and get the opt-in. Sometimes it’s things like, hey, if you opt in, there’s a free drink, or you could create things around it that would make people more likely to opt in when they get to the front desk.
Kin Sio: That makes sense. And it’s great that you mentioned the collaboration. It’s not just marketing and operations, different disciplines, right? Because especially in bigger hotel operations, the practice of revenue management also exists and that comes into the mix. As we all know, these different disciplines often operate in silos. How do you see that as a challenge, and for big or small hotels with different disciplines, how do you make sure that people actually talk to each other to break the silos?
Dan Wacksman: I’ve been in the industry a long time and I’ve been hearing the silo conversation for just as long. I think it’s getting better. There’s this push to have commercial strategy where all of these people sit in the same room and talk to each other. And they report to the same people.
I think the most important thing is that they have aligned KPIs, because if one KPI conflicts with another KPI, then you have problems. So as long as everybody is rowing in the same direction, it makes sense. But if my job is just to get direct bookings, then I don’t care about rate. If my only goal is to get rate, then maybe I don’t care about channel. So there are all sorts of things that you need to think about when you’re doing this. And I think having aligned KPIs is probably the key thing that needs to be done.
Kin Sio: Do you think those KPIs have a natural hierarchy of priority? Because what you just mentioned, exactly, we run into very often when we run revenue and marketing together for our clients. Marketing has that directive of increasing direct share, which sometimes doesn’t align with the overall top-line goal. Let’s get more business. That could mean shifting more business to OTAs, getting into our whole OTA frenemy conversation just now. Those naturally are in conflict from time to time. How would you unwind that to make sure those KPIs actually align?
[20:00]
Dan Wacksman: I think ultimately you go to — well, we’re not there yet as an industry and there’s all sorts of accounting issues that come into play as well. But ultimately it’s net operating income that you want to look at. Like I said, we’re not there yet. Some companies are getting closer to that, but you have to see how your KPIs feed into that. And if they don’t, then maybe it’s wrong.
I’ll give you an example of how sometimes we’re set up in weird ways that make us act in ways that are probably not all that rational. From an accounting perspective, marketing dollars is marketing dollars. When you do a marketing campaign, it comes out of that bucket. When you commission an agent, and that could be an OTA, that could be metasearch, when you commission them, it comes out of the commission line.
The way that has historically been viewed is your marketing budget is finite, but your commission budget is infinite because it doesn’t matter. It’s based on revenue coming in and the percentage of that goes off and then you’re paying for that revenue. So I’ve seen people shift money into commissionable stuff rather than marketing because they didn’t have the marketing budget to do it. It’s often not thought about holistically, but how it looks when you look at a spreadsheet.
Kin Sio: And I bet when you have your consulting engagements, hotel operators don’t come to you with that problem because many times they don’t even know where the problem exists. Is it part of your process of engagement, how would you walk an operator, a hotel owner or a manager, through that process to find the problem? Because I think it all comes down to the devil being in the details. Unless you get to that level of detail, you wouldn’t see where revenue leakage could be or where there are untapped opportunities. How would you walk them through your process to identify those problems accurately?
Dan Wacksman: That’s a tough one. It depends on how well they are at tracking things. You go into some hotels and they can’t even tell you their channel mix. But to me, one of the first things to look at is your channel mix and the revenue and then the ADR, and to see what are the most valuable channels.
But then there’s a missing piece there, because when you look at the OTA channel, for example, you need to really break that up into two parts. One is net rate and the other is commissionable, because a commissionable rate, when you’re looking at it at the top level, looks like it’s a great rate, but it hasn’t backed out the commission yet. So you really need to look at things holistically and that’s where you really need to work with revenue management and your accounting team to make sure that everything lines up. But you’re right, the devil’s in the details.
I’ll give you an example of a simplistic version of that. We talk about ROAS, return on ad spend. You would go to an executive meeting and the people who are not marketers would look at it and say, okay, we have a 20-to-1 ROAS, let’s put all our money in that. And this one has a 5-to-1 ROAS, let’s kill that.
But the 20-to-1 ROAS might be brand — you’re just buying brand terms. So you’re helping people who are already looking for you, find you. Of course that’s going to have a high ROAS. In fact, you might even kill that whole marketing line because it may not be a good use of money because those people probably would find you anyway. And we can argue about that point because you probably do want to put some in brand marketing, but of course it’s going to have a high ROAS.
[25:00]
Whereas the 5-to-1 ROAS might be a brand new customer. You were not even in that consideration set until you bought that ad. That’s a much more valuable customer, honestly, because I think the other customer is not incremental. This is net new, this is an incremental customer. So people always say let’s go with the highest ROAS, but the highest ROAS might not be the best way to do it. The devil’s always in the details. And sometimes that’s hard to explain to people, why you might want to do a campaign with a lower ROAS than one with a higher ROAS.
Kin Sio: This is golden, because everything — it’s not just marketing, not just hotels. I think everything that involves sales, naturally there’s a funnel. How to walk your prospective customers from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom. Obviously, as you get closer to the bottom of the funnel, people know more about you as a brand, as a property. They’re more likely to book and convert. That gets to the higher return on ad spend that you just mentioned, versus that incremental — how are you going to widen your net, getting those incremental bookings. I think to your point, the devil’s in the details. Any numbers in the industry, once you do the breakdown, there’s always more stories to it.
Switching gears a little bit, talking about your consulting business. I actually find the name of the consulting business, Sassato, fascinating, because Sassato — I don’t know a good translation — I mean, it’s a Japanese word for close to “just get it done.”
Dan Wacksman: When I started the company, I came up with a bunch of different names and none of the URLs were available, as you’d expect. But I wanted to position it as my company gives you a running start, meaning I’m not the type of person, or my company’s not the type of company, that has to come in and spend two weeks doing discovery. I can just jump in and start figuring things out and helping you get it done.
So ultimately I wanted it to be, if you said it colloquially, I want people to say my company gets shit done. We do it quickly, we do it efficiently, we understand the business, we don’t need to come in and learn about it. And I couldn’t find anything. Then I remembered there’s the word that I heard often in Japan, which is sassato, which means — it’s often said to children and other people — just hurry up, just do it, just get it done. And I was like, I wonder if that URL is available, and it was still available. So I booked it and that’s become our company name ever since.
Kin Sio: It’s such a big contrarian concept in this industry. Because what we often find is decision-making can be slow in this industry. What do you think are the common reasons that operators or decision-makers in this industry have a hard time making decisions quickly?
Dan Wacksman: I think it’s very common, and it’s not just our industry, maybe it’s a little bit worse in our industry, but it’s not just our industry. Technology, business, process changes quickly. And you need to reassess and do things differently. And you take somebody, probably your smartest person on the team or your most capable person in that area, and you ask them to add that onto their plate.
So they’re already at 120%, and you say, okay, now I also want you to assess a new website, a new booking engine, a new PMS, a new CRS. This person already has a full-time-plus-plus day job where they’re doing a great job, and they’ve been tasked to do that. What happens is it becomes part of their job but not their full-time job to get that done. So it ends up taking much, much longer than you would want it. The decision process takes much longer because they haven’t had a chance to do the full due diligence on it.
[30:00]
When I started consulting, to be honest, my expectation was I’d be doing a lot of marketing because that was really the area I was focused on — marketing and distribution. But what people kept coming to me for was technology. The reason why is because they couldn’t make a decision, and they couldn’t change. The reason why is they didn’t have a process. They didn’t have a right way to assess it.
What I do in my practice is I’ll come in and I’ll help you figure out the process. Or I come in with an already pre-built process that we’ve used dozens of times and that works. We help you all the way through the process and take it off your plate to the point where all you need to do is sit in on the pitches, listen, review the documents that they sent over, and I help guide you to a decision rather than you having to do all of that work.
And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients at the onset say, you know what, we don’t want to spend that much money doing the process, so we’re going to do it in-house. And then six months later, they come back to me and say, okay, we need somebody to help us push us through the finish line. Six months later. In reality, had they brought in somebody who specializes in it, they might have already implemented the new system instead of being still another six months out. So that’s what I see as the big issue — overloading team members. Their team members can do it. Nine times out of 10, they’re good, capable people who could absolutely do it. But rarely does their boss say, okay, we’re taking everything off your plate right now and we want you to focus on that. That just doesn’t happen.
Kin Sio: I wish it would stop, because when technology comes in and becomes almost the centerpiece of our operations, and the fact that technology just seems like something so foreign, like something from another industry — hospitality as an industry, we tend not to have the right training to really think about technology selection and implementation. It could be a completely different practice from delivering a great guest experience. So that naturally creates a gap of domain knowledge. I think you’re definitely filling a right knowledge gap in this industry for sure.
Dan Wacksman: The other thing is when you work with external people who are industry people — it’s interesting because a lot of times, and I know you at Lights On, you guys focus on hotels — I’ve hired agencies that don’t focus on hotels and you spend weeks explaining to them what ADR is, what ALOS is, what channels are, what OTAs are, what channel managers are. That’s a heavy lift. But if you bring in somebody who already has that knowledge, it just saves you so much time.
Kin Sio: Especially with the era of AI right now, when the cost of technology implementations is getting lower and lower, I think really what separates us from others is that domain knowledge. In the next era, the people who are going to win are going to be people who have multi-discipline knowledge so that they can really cross-apply this knowledge from one industry to another. I think those are going to be key for success in our new AI era.
[35:00]
So it’s funny how your consulting business started moving towards technology implementation and selection. What is the biggest technology mistake that you see hotel operators making right now? And obviously more towards the smaller independent boutique operators who don’t have a huge team thinking about these kinds of problems for them.
Dan Wacksman: I would say probably the single biggest issue is not taking a systematic approach. Basically, looking at your entire tech stack and making the right decision as a whole, instead of taking a piecemeal approach. And it’s hard, because you’re usually not starting from scratch.
What happens is you may have systems already in place and you start adding systems on top of that. And then you look back and you have a PMS, you have a CRS, you have a channel manager, you have a CRM, you have urgency tools on top of it. You have all these other tools that sit on top of all your other systems. You have integration issues and all sorts of things that come about. So every once in a while, you need to take a good hard look at your tech stack and say, is this the right tech stack?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done an audit on a tech stack — when I talk about tech stack, I’m more talking the commercial tech stack. I’m not talking about servers and things like that, or wifi. I’m talking about the systems I just rattled off. I go in and I say, okay, give me a list of all your systems. First of all, that often takes a couple of weeks because nobody in their company has a list of all their systems. The next question is let me see all the contracts. Again, couple of weeks. Nobody knows where all the contracts are. Nine times out of 10, they have to get some of them from the vendors and say, can you send me our contract?
Then when I look, there’s two things I look at. One is what are they utilizing it for? What value are they getting out of it? So many times I found that they have contracts that they signed years ago that they’re paying for, that they’re not even using any of the applications that they’re paying for.
Then another aspect you see is they have overlapping functionality. So they bought an urgency tool — when I say urgency tool, it’s something that says, it’s an overlay that says you have two hours to book or 10 other people are looking at it, something that makes people feel like there’s an urgency to book. But their booking engine already has a built-in one. Maybe the one that they bought is better, I don’t know, but you need to assess, do we need both? Can we get rid of this one and the cost of that one? The answer may be this is much better because it does XYZ, which is fine, but you have that rationalization there. Or the answer may be, we get 90% out of the box and we’re already paying for it so we don’t need this anymore.
Another big mistake is not paying attention to contract end dates. I’ve seen contracts that roll over to three-year terms. And if you don’t give the 90-day notice in the contract, they’re going to hold you to it, or they’re going to make you buy it out.
So keep your eye on when those contracts expire. And also, there may be an opportunity, even if you like it, to renegotiate. Has your volume increased? Maybe you can bring down the transaction cost if it’s transaction-based. If it’s a SaaS model, maybe you can reduce the monthly on it. So you want to stay on top of it.
[40:00]
There’s an interesting thing that happened in the past 10, 15 years. It used to be IT controlled all of the technology and all the decisions were made there. There was one person who was on the hook to check everything. But we moved away from that. Everything now is cloud-based. Everything is SaaS-based. So what happens is, as a marketer, I can make my own technology decision. As a revenue manager, I can make my own technology decision. As a finance person, I can make my own technology decision without necessarily needing to bring in IT or them checking it or looking at it.
So having a central point, at least somebody who understands everything that’s going on, is a good thing. But what’s happened now is you have all these departments buying what they think they need, not understanding potential connectivity, not understanding that the HR system that HR bought does the same thing that the marketing system that you bought does. So you miss out on all of that.
Kin Sio: There’s so much value in just that one answer. I think every hotel today, one action you can take immediately right now after listening to this podcast — go audit your systems, go audit your technology stack, go audit all the contracts. I bet probably seven out of 10 times, someone can really find cost savings from there. And that’s just for the cost savings. Do you have examples of when the stack is not aligned? Are there any revenue implications that could happen from a wrong tech stack as well?
Dan Wacksman: Sure, the integrations is the big thing. Failure to effectively integrate two-way integrations to make sure everything’s synced up could lead to channels not working, important channels not working. It can lead to wrong rates going out. It could lead to all sorts of issues. So I think having really tight integrations and understanding them is extremely important as well.
Kin Sio: So much value just from that. So just changing —
Dan Wacksman: I was going to say that I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I used to tell hotels, look, I’ll come in, I’ll do it two ways. I’ll charge you a flat fee and help you do all of this and assess it. Or give me 10% of the savings that I find in a year, or pay me nothing. Nobody ever took the 10% deal because they’re afraid I’m going to find too much. And I usually, almost always — actually in every case I’ve ever done it — I’ve covered my costs and then some. Had I done the 10% deal, my bank account would be a lot healthier today.
Kin Sio: Hey, it’s still a good 10x return for most of us folks out there.
Okay, switching gears a little bit. From consulting and thinking about technology stacks — your latest project, Hawaii Hotel Hui. Obviously now it’s a platform, lots of golden information for hoteliers, especially in Hawaii right now. It’s a completely different venture. How did you decide to build that aside from doing all the engagements at Sassato?
[45:00]
Dan Wacksman: Again, I talk about being in the right place at the right time and maybe just doing things that tend to work out. But this one was really — my idea behind the newsletter was I just wanted to have a newsletter to get in front of the Hawaii hotel community, especially my network, in order to really be a lead gen tool for my consulting business.
The idea was, as a consultant, people need you when they need you. And when they need you, they don’t remember you. So my idea was if I was in their inbox every month and they needed somebody to help with a tech audit or a new platform, they’d say, oh yeah, there’s that guy, Dan, who does that newsletter. And I expected to reach two or three hundred people max, sort of my network and my extended network. Within a couple of months, I had a few thousand subscribers. At events I go to, people always come up and tell me how much they love the newsletter.
Then about six months into it — I was doing once a month — unsolicited, a tech company came up to me and said, hey, would you be open to having sponsors in it? I didn’t even think about it. And that’s when the light bulb went off that maybe this could be a little bit bigger than just a simple lead gen tool.
So I pivoted a little bit away from being a lead gen tool to being its own standalone newsletter. We went from once a month to twice a month. We created sponsorship packages. It’s been amazing because I tend to have a tech and distribution bent, so I expected a lot of technology companies and other companies like that to sponsor, which they have. We’ve had Lights On, we’ve had other technology companies as well — PMS companies like Stayntouch and others as sponsors.
But I had people I didn’t expect, like Alana Builders & Burst, ABB. I didn’t even know who they were when we started, but they’re a national construction company, maybe international. They do a ton of work here in Hawaii and they do great work. I had never heard of them. But they were interested in our audience. Just like I hadn’t heard of them, a lot of our audience hadn’t heard of them. And now they’ve been seen thousands of times through their sponsorship, both on the newsletter, on our website, and on our LinkedIn.
So it’s really grown to be a sponsorship platform. And now I’m looking to grow it — a platform that sponsors are eager to work on, but I want to grow it beyond that. We’ve built a website, which Lights On has helped me with as well. We’re trying to build it out more as a diverse platform with the newsletter being the core of it, but having other aspects as well.
My current vision of what it will be — and who knows what it will be in six months — is that we’ll be a platform where Hawaii hotel and tourism people come to get information and answers. Whether it be what’s going on in the space from a news perspective, to I need a new PMS, who do I go to? I need a new website, who do I go to? I’m looking for a development company to help me buy a property. Because we’re building out that platform where we have all that information.
That would be the vision — that hoteliers come to me, and on the other side, potential vendors and partners come to me who want to make their products and services known to the hotel and tourism community in Hawaii. So it’s that two-sided platform. It’s super niche, it’s Hawaii. And that’s what I want to do. I want to create this super Hawaii-centric platform. Everything out there tends to be more globally oriented, geared towards everybody. I think we have a unique environment here in Hawaii. And I think we need a platform like this that speaks to the way things are done here. So that’s the vision. But at this point, we’re just having fun with it and trying different things and seeing what works. More to come on that.
Kin Sio: For anyone in Hawaii or even companies out there who want to get into Hawaii, if you haven’t, you should subscribe to the platform and the newsletter. We’ll make sure to put the link in the show notes. I think why people like your content so much is, to your point, being local and being genuine. Especially in the era of AI right now, we have all of this AI slop out there. I think people really feel like you’re writing in the local style that people know. You have to be on the ground here, understand all the network, all the connections, all the relationships here to produce content like that. And that part is what really becomes valuable when writing professionally becomes so easy with ChatGPT and all that. So yeah, we’ll make sure to put the link in the show notes if you haven’t subscribed yet, which honestly I feel like every hotelier on the island in this industry is already subscribed to that. Kudos to you.
Last question for you, just to close out the show. This year, past year has been a pretty rough year for Hawaii. I know the tourism industry in general hasn’t seen numbers like this since the pandemic. Demand is down, we have all these bigger players, the PE firms coming in and owning more hotels here. And then on the tax and government side of things, we are all getting higher taxes and things like that. I feel like operating a hotel here, especially for independent owners — you’re just feeling squeezed at all angles. How would an owner like that, what does this person need to get right in the next two years just to survive?
Dan Wacksman: I think you’ve got to put a little bit of perspective behind this as well. I was talking to a friend on the continent and I was telling him things are a little tough here and he says, what do you mean? Tell me your numbers. I was like, we’re at 79% occupancy and $322 ADR. And he almost fell off his chair.
Almost every market in the United States would kill for those numbers. And we look at those as being bad numbers. And why are they bad? That’s the perspective part of it. Why they’re bad is because we’re not seeing growth, we’re seeing flatness, and we’re not anywhere near our peak years, and our costs are going up substantially. That is a very, very big factor.
So I think we’re at around 2.5% RevPAR growth or something like that. It’s essentially flat, but the costs are growing much higher than that. The national number is not as high as the Hawaii number because we have to have everything shipped in and the costs are a lot more. Our union contracts with hotel employees are a lot richer than our counterparts on the mainland. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m just saying it’s a reality.
So you have that balance of, yeah, we’re not doing terrible, but our costs are growing faster than our revenues are growing. So it’s an issue. Cost control is obviously something that people need to look into. From a revenue standpoint, getting direct revenue that costs you less is going to be better. More is going to drop to the bottom line. And I think those are the areas that they need to concentrate on and get their fair share of the market.
There’s always something, right? Last time I was moderating a panel, everybody was talking about the green shoots and things are starting to look good. And then we bomb Iran. And so things change. Is that good for us? Is that bad for us? I don’t know.
In my last newsletter, I talked about the fact that you had the issues in Mexico — which by the way, no tourist was hurt or killed in that — and then you had the issue in the Middle East now. What tends to happen in situations like this, people want to stay home. And if you recall, we had our best years with the revenge travel after COVID when people were still a little wary to travel overseas. And we’re the international destination that’s still in the United States. So there’s a potential opportunity there that we’ll see more.
But on the other hand, maybe costs go up and people’s discretionary spending goes down. Who knows what’s going to happen with all of that. But there is potential opportunity that we could grow even in a year that’s tough. Get out there and market in the right way, let people know what we have to offer. You’d never want to capitalize on something terrible that’s happened somewhere else, but it doesn’t stop you from accentuating your positive points. We’re in the United States, you don’t need a passport. It’s a safe destination. The most beautiful destination in the world. All of those things that we can go out and put our best foot forward.
Kin Sio: Thank you, Dan. Thank you for all the wisdom. Where can people learn more about you?
Dan Wacksman: I have two websites. One is sassato.com, S-A-S-S-A-T-O dot com. You can find out about my consulting business there. And you can go to hawaiihotelhui.com. If you’re watching this, hopefully you know what a hui is — a hui is a community or a group. It’s H-U-I, and we’ll put them in your notes. Go to hawaiihotelhui.com. The idea is to create a community, not just a website or a newsletter. We have lots of great feedback that I include in the newsletter and on our LinkedIn as well. You can subscribe there, look at previous issues there as well. So those are the two best ways.
Kin Sio: We’ll make sure those are in our show notes. All right, Dan Wacksman, founder and CEO of Sassato and Hawaii Hotel Hui. Thank you very much.
Dan Wacksman: Thank you, appreciate it. This was great fun. Thank you.
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