Kin Sio is the CEO of Lights On Digital, a commercial strategy firm for independent hotels. He acquired the company in early 2025, bringing a background that includes product management at Microsoft and the founding team of Coinbase International Exchange. Kin leads LOD's work connecting pricing, distribution, and marketing into one revenue system — helping independent hotels compete without the infrastructure of a large chain.
Independent hotels have access to most of the same tools as major chains — but most don't use them. In this episode, Kin Sio, CEO of Lights On Digital, breaks down why smaller operators leave significant revenue on the table, and what changes when pricing, distribution, and marketing are run as one coordinated system instead of three separate vendors.
Kin draws on his experience in tech — including product management at Microsoft and building Coinbase's international exchange — and his first year running a hospitality commercial strategy firm. The conversation covers why auto-pricing tools still can't replace human judgment, how to align marketing spend with rate strategy instead of running ads blindly, and why the first step isn't marketing at all — it's understanding how your property actually makes money.
If you run an independent or boutique hotel and your revenue manager, marketing agency, and website vendor don't talk to each other, this episode explains why that's costing you more than you think.
On why he left big tech for hospitality:
On the industry's resistance to change:
On why auto-pricing isn't enough:
On what revenue management gives back to hotel teams:
On the purpose of the podcast:
1. Audit your channel mix before changing your pricing. Most hotels discount to compensate for distribution problems, not demand problems. Know where your bookings come from before adjusting rates.
2. Stop treating revenue management and marketing as separate budgets. Every paid campaign should be evaluated against its impact on ADR and channel cost — not just clicks or impressions.
3. Build a pace reporting habit. Knowing your booking pace vs. prior year — by segment — is the foundation of every good pricing decision. If you're not tracking pace, you're pricing on gut feel.
4. Measure your OTA dependency honestly. If more than 60% of your bookings come through one channel, you have a risk problem, not just a cost problem. Map your channel mix and set a target for direct.
5. Treat your website as a revenue channel, not a brochure. Booking engine conversion rate is a metric your team should review monthly — right alongside occupancy and ADR.
This episode is sponsored by Lights On Digital.
Lights On Digital helps independent hotels grow revenue by managing pricing, distribution, and marketing as one system — not three separate vendors. We find the gaps between your rate strategy, your channel mix, and your ad spend, then close them. Your team stays focused on the guest. We handle the commercial engine.
If your hotel's revenue feels like it should be higher but you can't pinpoint why, visit lightson.co to learn more.
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Welcome to the Lights On Podcast featuring stories behind building and running successful hotel businesses. Let's get started.
Kin Sio: Hi, I'm Kin Sio. I'm the host of the Lights On Podcast where I talk to hotel owners and operators who are building and growing a hospitality business. Each episode features stories from the owners and leaders running hotels and making real decisions every day.
This episode is sponsored by Lights On. Lights On helps hotels grow revenue more consistently by managing pricing, distribution, and digital marketing all together. We help hotels identify the highest-impact revenue opportunities so they don't leave money on the table. We also run the full revenue and marketing operation so hotel teams can stay focused on the guest experience. If you want to unlock more revenue at your hotel, visit lightson.co to learn more.
Today we have Chad here from Rise25, who has done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, and we have flipped the script — he will be interviewing me this time. Chad, welcome to the show.
Chad: Hey Kin, thanks so much. It's great to talk to you. I really appreciate it and I'm looking forward to finding out more about you and more about Lights On. Hey, tell me — you had been kind of working your way through a tech career and then you left to pursue business ownership. What inspired that?
Kin Sio: Yeah. I was fortunate enough to start my professional career in the tech industry. I was working at some of the big tech companies where there were high concentrations of talent — so many, in fact, that when you see all these smart people around you, not everyone is really driving real business impact. When you're working in big companies with about 100,000 people, everybody's so smart, but not everybody is really making real impact. So that kind of got me to a point where I really wanted to do something that means something and creates real impact for the people around me.
That's when I started searching for small businesses, because ultimately, Main Street business is what's driving this country. I wanted to find a business that really adds value to other business owners as well. I ended up connecting with the previous owners at Lights On. We figured out what Lights On does, we have a good niche — we are serving great people in the hospitality industry, where there are just so many things that can be done based on what I knew from the tech industry.
I think people in these industries deserve better ways of doing things. There are so many hardworking people in hospitality businesses, so finding ways to help them be smarter, do things more efficiently, so that they can enjoy the impact with less hassle — that's really what drove me to make the acquisition of Lights On and run it. Just making sure that people are getting more stuff done, getting more profits, getting more revenue with less hassle.
Chad: Was there something about Lights On that was particularly attractive, maybe compared to other possible opportunities that you might have had?
Kin Sio: Yeah. One — it's really the people. Lights On is based in Hawaii, which is like — when I first learned about this company and the owners, everybody gets the misconception of, "Oh, people working in Hawaii will be like people coming in with surfboards and not treating business for real," which is completely, completely wrong.
When I actually got to meet the previous owners and the team at Lights On, just knowing how hardworking people are, and actually how smart they are in terms of helping all the hotel clients that we have to be successful — growing their revenue, profits, getting more exposure, getting all the tourists and guests to know about their properties — I think there's something really amazing and magical happening here within Lights On. That's what really drew me to learning more about Lights On in the first place.
The other key piece is the fact that Lights On is very focused in one industry, which is hospitality. That's very important. There are so many marketing agencies out there that are industry-agnostic — they'll be serving plumbers, electricians, insurance companies. There are just so many things that are nuanced within this one industry, hospitality, that it really deserves full focus. All these best practices, all the tips and tricks that only work for this industry — a generic company or marketing agency would never have that level of insight.
From what I learned about what the team is working on and just their expertise about this industry and hotels in particular, I saw true competency that I couldn't find in any other marketing agency that I was looking at.
Chad: So I know you work with hotels and you help manage pricing, distribution, and digital marketing. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Kin Sio: Yeah, and it might be a foreign concept to a lot of smaller hotel operators as well. In reality, it's what all these big hotels and big brands have been doing for decades. Usually big hotels come in and they have a whole division of commercial strategy that includes revenue management — which is essentially a fancy way of saying managing all the room pricing, optimizing the pricing for the best profit. Then they have the sales organizations, where people are constantly going out hunting for group business, wholesale business, and things like that. And then they have the marketing department that runs all the marketing functions that you would think of. So it has been built in a pretty defined way for these big corporates.
Now when you come to the smaller properties — sometimes it could be mom-and-pop hotel operators who run a 30-room hotel by the beach town. Some of these hotel owners aren't even coming from a hospitality background. They could become a hotel owner or operator by accident. It could be a hotel that was inherited from their family. They come in, they were never trained in any of this, and they have to find ways to make things work. A lot of the time they make it work great, but many times they miss opportunities because they're not trained in this discipline, while all the big corporates and big brands have already built these principles for decades.
I think it's a huge gap — almost like taking these big principles from the big players and applying them to smaller properties. Sometimes we see amazing results. Some of the constant comments and feedback coming from our clients are like, "Wow, I didn't know that you can actually do this or that." Many hotel owners sometimes run their property almost like a real estate rental business, which in reality is just very different.
Lights On is really in a unique place to apply a lot of these principles and learnings, because we have team members who worked and spent decades in these big brands. Having them use that expertise and those principles to help smaller operators succeed is really the passion of Lights On.
Chad: Do most of the clients that you work with know that they need you right away, or do they have to be sold?
Kin Sio: It's a mix. We work with hotels big and small. We have bigger hotels that are in the 300 to 400 room range, and then we have smaller ones with maybe 10 or 20 rooms.
The bigger hotels can afford the budget to hire more people in the hospitality industry. These are generally hotels or clients that already know what to expect — they already know some of the principles that we just talked about in revenue management, digital marketing, distribution, sales, and all that. So they have expectations: "This is what Lights On offers. I know what Lights On can bring to the table to optimize our revenue and profits."
On the smaller side of the spectrum, these are truly the independent or boutique hotel owners. They sometimes see a subset of value from Lights On because they're used to working with digital marketing agencies — a marketing team that comes in to run your Google Ads, run your Facebook Ads, and things like that. But one thing these property owners often don't know about is the whole discipline of where to distribute your room inventory and how to best optimize your price. That whole commercial strategy or revenue management aspect of the business is often missed because they just didn't know such a thing exists.
And then going to the extreme — the even smaller hotel owners — they just had no idea that you could do revenue management and things like that. These are usually the clients or prospects or owners that need to be sold and need to be shown what could be possible to really improve their business by a million miles.
Chad: As we talked about, you had a background in tech. How has that influenced your approach to running Lights On?
Kin Sio: Yeah, it's an eye-opening experience. Some of our team members — the company has always talked about hospitality business being a dinosaur business. The hospitality industry retains a lot of the processes and practices from decades ago. Things are still done on a relatively manual basis. A lot of our revenue managers still run some of the calculations and data analysis through spreadsheets.
Coming from a tech background, where things are being done at the highest leverage using technology, I definitely see opportunities — not just for the hotels that we serve, but also as a company internally. There are so many opportunities to really supercharge our productivity with the use of technology.
We are living in a time where human civilization has come to a crazy spot with all this AI innovation happening so fast. I think it's the best time right now to use some of the latest cutting-edge technologies to help an industry that has been known for being behind to make that leapfrog. I'm super excited about those opportunities ahead of us, both for Lights On as a company and for all the hotels that we serve — to really show them that there are ways to do things in a much easier way while getting so much more results.
People in this industry are trained to be very hardworking. I'm sure everyone listening to the show, or just anyone who has traveled and stayed at a hotel — you think about looking at the housekeepers and the front desk staff — these are some of the most hardworking human beings that you could ever imagine. There are ways for these good people to be better at their jobs and not have as much hassle. I'm really excited that Lights On offers a lot of this value and help to hotel owners and hardworking people in the industry to really enjoy the outcomes of technology.
Chad: Okay, very nice. One of the things, as I mentioned, you help with for hotels is pricing. How do you help them optimize pricing strategy?
Kin Sio: Yeah, it is honestly the most challenging topic in the hospitality industry. If you think about demand and supply — well, actually, let's use Uber as an example. I'm kind of talking about the misconception of what people would think about how hotel pricing works.
Most people nowadays use Uber, Lyft. When you want to take a ride, you insert your point A to point B, Uber calculates the whole pricing for the trip, and everything is automated. Great. That kind of trains consumers really well — they come to expect that the pricing of rides, hotels, airplane tickets, and all that are all based on supply and demand.
In hotels, it's not as automated as what you'd expect from just taking an Uber ride. There are solutions out there that will automate your pricing based on demand and supply — great — but in the hotel industry, with all these different market factors, it's more complex. Taking Hawaii as an example since we're based there: the global demand for traveling to Hawaii, the competition of that many hotels concentrated on a very small island, what your competition does in terms of their pricing — all of these could be factors impacting the optimal pricing for a hotel.
That really makes it challenging for any sort of automated pricing software to work well. Obviously in hospitality there are auto-pricing technology solutions out there, but many hotels — even the biggest hotels on the island — don't fully trust auto-pricing. There are just so many factors that current technology hasn't gotten to a point where it's smart enough to account for. And let's say we get to that point where the tool can optimize that price — when you have 10 hotels on the same street all doing the same thing, you still need a driver in the seat to add that extra layer of human intelligence to define the pricing.
These are all the principles that have to be in place in our day-to-day operations. We have a portfolio of hotels. We come in and look at the pricing every day. We look at the competitor's pricing. We look at the market demand. We look at whether there's a long weekend coming soon where everybody's going to be hiking on that price — at what point do you want to raise the price, and for how long? These are all the pricing conversations and decisions that we have to make on behalf of clients to maximize their revenue potential.
This is a very in-depth answer of how dynamic pricing looks in the hotel industry, which I think people outside of the industry would never understand — that there are actually many more layers on top of "dynamic pricing." These are all the things that we run on behalf of our clients, so that we take all of the analysis, demand forecasting, and things like that out of their way. Hotel leaders can really focus on what they do best, which is giving the guest the best experience when they arrive at the property.
Chad: Sure. What about digital marketing? What's Lights On's approach to that?
Kin Sio: Yeah, that can go really hand-in-hand with the pricing aspect of what we just mentioned. On the digital marketing side — let's start with what every marketing agency does. A marketing agency comes in, takes over the client's responsibility for running all the digital ads, whether it's ads on Google, ads on Facebook, and all that. Sometimes in the hospitality space there are more niche solutions for advertising. If you think about Expedia or Booking.com, you can even run ads on those platforms. There are a lot more advertising channels that we have to think about in the hospitality space.
Many times other agencies come in with that generic mindset. They are not used to having that many channels to manage. Because we are invested deep into this industry and do this on a daily basis, it's pretty natural to us. That's kind of one level beyond just being a generic marketing agency running digital marketing.
Now the second layer of expertise comes from the collaboration between the pricing aspect and the marketing aspect. Fine-tuning marketing opportunities based on how we price the hotel is critical, and many agencies can't do that because they don't understand the pricing aspect of hotels.
A quick example: a property could be running, let's say, $1,000 of Google Ads for the month. It turns out that on the pricing side, weekends are usually priced higher and there's naturally more demand because of people coming in over the weekend — but there's not enough business on the weekdays. So now, how can we run some of the ads more selectively on the periods that the hotel needs it the most? How can we fine-tune our messaging and campaigns so that we can actually focus more conversion from the ads toward the need periods?
That's a super simple example just with weekday versus weekend. But now think about seasonality. If you look at the whole year, not every month has the same volume of demand of guests coming to Hawaii. We have seasonality that is very specific to Hawaii. Think about Montana — it could be very different. Think about Florida — it could be a different seasonality again.
Building campaigns and digital marketing plans according to those macro seasonality patterns of the market, and then taking it the next level down — within those seasons, knowing how the hotel performed last year versus this year, we can understand where we'll be expecting a shortage of business on particular days or periods because that's all informed by the hotel's performance from the previous year. Then we can do the further fine-tuning of the campaigns and the digital marketing plan.
These are really the differences that we make with the collaboration of the pricing management side of things. A marketing agency for plumbers coming in — they wouldn't expect to understand all these nuances. This is the core competency, the muscle that we have at Lights On that makes us different.
Chad: Sure. So with marketing and revenue management — as you take on new clients or even talk to potential clients, are there some common misconceptions that existing hotels have about marketing and revenue management?
Kin Sio: Definitely. The most common scenario is hotels coming to us thinking that we are a pure marketing agency. The first conversation is, "Hey, we are either running ads in-house or we had another agency running our marketing. I need you to take over doing this."
Our usual approach is: no, no, no — that's kind of the afterthought. Let's actually take a step back and think about the blueprint of how your property or your hotel really makes money. How does demand actually flow? At the very top — how do people discover the hotel? How do people make their pricing decisions? How do they decide if this particular hotel is priced too high or too low for their budget?
We look from that perspective to build a blueprint: this is how your guests first discover you, how they make their pricing decisions, and then how does the property itself make the right pricing decisions to capture that demand. People are always coming to Hawaii anyway, but why would they choose your hotel over other hotels? There are always factors. One is how you price competitively against your competitors. Two is how you use marketing to showcase the unique experience that your property has that other properties don't.
We take that holistic approach. Let's have the blueprint. Let's understand the market positioning of your property, your pricing strategy, and even where does this property distribute its inventory. Can people book only through your website? Can they book through Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Airbnb? Different hotels have different decisions to make on what makes sense. Maybe Hotel A should only be on Expedia and have inventory on their direct website. Hotel B — it might make sense for them to get on Airbnb as well.
These are the things that we look at holistically before we even talk about running ads. This is a misconception that especially smaller hotel owners miss, because they come in expecting that they are hiring a marketing agency. But in fact, we actually provide more than just marketing. We come in and think about all the pricing, distribution, and marketing decisions that a hotel needs to make to maximize revenue across the board.
Chad: Okay, sounds good. Hey, this is one of your first episodes for this podcast. What are you most looking forward to about being the host?
Kin Sio: Yeah, really the key is getting connected to lots of hotel operators, owners, and hospitality leaders. Like I said, I got so fascinated with this industry because we have so many talented and hardworking people working on all aspects of it.
If you look at the big luxury hotels — like a Renaissance or JW Marriott — they provide a very different experience from a small boutique 20-room hotel by the beach. They're all doing the same thing, which is serving guests, hoping they can come and have a good time during their stay. They're all trying to do the same thing, but they do it in very different ways.
I really want to create a platform like this — the Lights On Podcast — to showcase hospitality leaders from all walks of life, to showcase what they do. Hopefully having those stories creates new wisdom for hoteliers in general — that there could be things you can borrow. A small hotel can borrow from a JW Marriott, or vice versa, to create that sharing of knowledge and stories.
And just the fact of getting more connected with all these hotel leaders and operators — these are all very interesting people, and learning their stories and the "why" behind how they operate their properties. I think these are all fascinating stories that we should share more broadly with the industry.
Chad: Yeah, sounds great. Hey, Kin, it's been great to talk to you. Thanks so much for having me and sharing all of your insights. Really appreciate it.
Kin Sio: All right. Thank you very much, Chad.
Chad: So long, everybody.
Kin Sio: Thanks for listening to the Lights On Podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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