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As a hospitality industry trainer specific to the lodging industry, I am always interested to learn what the word itself means to people across the spectrum of culture, language, and other human demographics. When I started out years ago, I first researched the word itself. Various dictionary definitions told me that it meant 'Treating guests with warmth and generosity.' When I researched the root of the word, which originates from the Latin word 'hospes,' I learned that it originally referred to both the guest and the host.

It is time for the lodging industry to reimagine both the title and role and to transition from Revenue Manager, which implies a passive role in 'managing' revenue that is generated elsewhere, to a more active label as 'Revenue Generator Manager' (RGM). While we’re at it, perhaps our leading association, HSMAI, should even rename its Revenue Optimization Conference as the Revenue Generation Conference!

What We Can Expect at this Year's Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition & Conference in Orlando

Four irreversible trends are redefining excellence in service operations. For today’s leaders, they could be a transformational opportunity – or an existential threat.

The input is revenue. The output is profit. And the latter is what matters most. You can’t have profit without revenue, but how you manage that input dictates how much or how little your output becomes.

One of the bright spots for the hotel industry amid the pandemic was the ability to hold – if not drive – average daily rate, particularly in leisure-led, drive-to markets. It is something that evaded hoteliers during prior calamities, including 9/11 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, when hotels slashed rates in an attempt to win back demand. It proved a faulty strategy.

Business travel is returning, take it from my family who are experiencing me being back on the road again. Despite recovery happening at a different pace across the world, some markets are slowly emerging from the risk zone and business travelers are dusting off their hold all bags, looking to take that next trip.

Despite best efforts, there is an assumption that COVID will become an endemic disease, meaning it’s here in perpetuity, like the flu. That means one thing: better get used to it. If it’s Omicron one day, it could be Upsilon next. For the hotel industry, that means rolling with the punches – hard or soft. The dark days of 2020 are – touch wood – never coming back and as 2022 casts off, the year ahead appears brighter, if not still bumpy.

Having been in the profession of hotel training for over three decades, with an average of six clients a month, one can imagine I have stayed in a lot of lodging facilities across all segments. I am often asked 'What is your favorite hotel ever?' To me, picking out a favorite hotel is like being asked to pick a favorite child; we love them all, right? (Well, most of the time, anyway!) But I must admit, I do have a very short list of a select few that truly stand out.

Few areas of life have evolved more than travel or been as central to the evolution of societies, birth of new cultures and global innovation. Travel exists to proliferate experiences and bring people together. And you don’t have to look very far to chart an astronomical growth curve. In 1970 just over 310 million passengers had flown on a plane worldwide. By 2019 that number grew to 4.5 Billion