How a Revenue Manager-Turned-CEO Drives Profit as Market Conditions Shift - Ben Campbell, Hospitality America

Josiah: What are some of those levers you think about in terms of driving financial performance?

Ben: Driving the financial performance really comes down to assessing what the demand is. Every piece that we are fixated on right now is understanding that every single piece of business is going to have its own set of profitability. A sports group that is high impact at a hotel is going to be more expensive than a potential corporate group that we could book over that same time period. So understanding what those costs are is critical to us, which is why we've been long supporters of ProfitSword and Actabl. Because as that data gets more and more finite, more clean and clear, then we're able to make better decisions. So, as demand has flatlined, it becomes all about our business mix. It always is, but in times like now, it's about how to find those pockets of areas that we can grow. And if that's in an adjustment in our business mix, if it's even at a hotel being able to sell more premium nights into premium room types. And assessing across the entire asset where our opportunities are. It's important all the time, but especially now when RevPARs are flatlining.

Josiah: Let's talk about the investments that you've made into business intelligence. To your point of finding these pockets of opportunity, you have a commercial background, revenue management background. I think that function historically has been a little more dialed into what is going on in the business and the market. Now you're CEO of a company. You made an investment into business intelligence. I wonder if you could tell me the story of how you thought about that. How did that come to be and what does that look like today?

Ben: Well, first I want to give credit where credit's due. Our Chief Strategy Officer, Leigh Holloway, is really a big key piece to it. She pushes me every single day to think bigger in this space. She also has a big commercial background and was and is a brilliant revenue strategist. For me it's all about the analytical side of things. What we love about revenue management is you get to try a strategy, test it, and figure out what works and what doesn't work. So we kind of apply that across all aspects now of Hospitality America. We're not afraid to try new things. Our owners trust us and we're going to go out and figure out what works and what doesn't work. And sometimes it's right, sometimes it's not. So when it comes down to our business intelligence side, we've got to have tools that can give us clean, clear data to understand what is working and what's not. So what we want and what we love about Actabl is that we can also get that information into our own environment so that we can now have that playing off of different tools. We've also been a long partner of Hotel Effectiveness in this. We envision a day in a world where our forecasting, business intelligence, and scheduling is all happening very real time. Day to day, week to week, because the data's interacting with one another. I think if we don't have the foundation of clean data, then when that day comes, and maybe it's tomorrow and maybe it's today or maybe in the next couple of years, we won't be able to do anything with that data if we don't have it clean, clear, and consolidated.

Josiah: Interesting. It feels like that's even more important in an increasingly AI-enabled world where tools are able to interpret this data, but getting the foundation right is important. What are some of the big barriers and how have you overcome some of those barriers to get to this place? Because it allows you as a CEO now to operate with visibility and be fast and decisive. But what did you have to work through to get there?

Ben: A lot. I think when we undertook it, we didn't realize how much it was going to be to clean the data. We're not perfect today. We don't have it where it's seamless. It still takes a lot of work and we're not quite to the point where we're deploying it across all of our assets yet. We feel like we're close within the next year, we would say. But I think what we learned is that through any of those projects, it takes longer than you think it will, and it costs more than you think it will. So I think we're appreciative of our owners. Hospitality America made a front-side investment. But they believed in our vision of, okay, this will come and then we'll be able to do it. But the other thing that I want to be careful of is why I think it's such an important thing at a foundational level is that everything's changing above it. Every single day. It's almost like every couple weeks a new LLM is coming out. And it used to be all about OpenAI. Now Claude is overtaking and then by the time you kind of hitch onto one horse, the other one comes out with something great. So if we don't have the foundational level of our data, then we don't feel like when that time comes from a consolidation standpoint or a consistency standpoint, that we'll be ready. We do think we will because we've partnered with Actabl and Hotel Effectiveness and the other forecasting tools that we have to do our job.

Josiah: Well, maybe in a world where it does feel like everything's changing, you focus and invest in the thing that is not going to change: the data, the foundation. That's what you have done.

Ben: Yeah.

Josiah: I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about some of the benefits you've seen already, whether it is in interacting with owners or making other decisions across the business. What are some of the benefits you've realized now on your journey so far?

Ben: Owners wake up every single day wanting to look at the same numbers that we look at. They want to understand the business, they want to understand it from a high level so that they can make investment decisions for their assets as well. So for us it's about getting that information to them as quickly as possible so that we don't have to bog down our time and our capacity of operating the hotels. We can quickly find the data, get to the information, and give it to them to make the decisions or help them make the decisions together. That's really where we feel like our value is, that we're sitting alongside the seats with our owners, helping them make those decisions. It's because we understand the information and what's truly happening through the numbers just as much as they do.

Josiah: I love it. I wonder if we can go back to the commercial side for a moment. Talk about that again. It feels like over the last couple months, different events I've gone to, there's just this feeling of we need to pull some commercial levers to win in this environment. As you think about that in an environment of demand being pretty stagnant and maybe some growth ahead of us, what do you think about doing right now to drive commercial performance?

Ben: We look at it from two different levers. The revenue management tactic side, and then just boots on the ground, selling and solicitation. We've doubled down on the sales and solicitation in the past couple of years. People still want that engagement of, I've got a problem, I need somebody to help me solve it. Or I've got a business group, I've got an event, I'm going to talk to somebody who I have the confidence can fulfill that event.

Josiah: You doubled down just in the last couple years. What's going through my head right now is it feels that AI use has increased in the last couple years, but you've doubled down in that human connection. Why is that?

Ben: Because we feel like that's where we could win in the short and intermediate term. On the revenue management side, this year is our investment time period for that. We've been historically great at it. What we now are investing in is more on the distribution channel side, where we feel like there's opportunity. When we look at the process of our hotel room types, whether it's on our brand.com, Expedia, any type of booking channel, it's all about how we're displayed on that, how our information is on all those channels. With the LLMs, you could ask for... we could be going to the exact same place and you say, I want to go to San Francisco. Same dates. You'll get a different curated experience from that LLM than I will. And so what that puts us in a position where that's not really SEO anymore. It's all about the scores that we have that are publicly available, the reviews that we have, the information that we have, because the LLM is going to then curate what you want based upon how you interact with it and how I've interacted with mine to curate that type of experience that it thinks you want. So that puts us in a position of a little bit of an unknown because we don't know how you utilize your LLM. But all we can do is focus on those levers, which is good customer service, intent of what the experience is like at the hotel, and innately knowing what the market position of that hotel is so that we can really fine tune that and deliver.

Josiah: I find that fascinating because you're taking this dual track approach to win in this more AI-powered world where there are millions and millions of permutations of how it could be represented. So this goes back to the data investments you're making. You're building the company to win in an AI-enabled world. At the same time doubling down on the human connection. And I kind of feel this with, when I'm talking to my events leader and we have an event, maybe it's tens of thousands, maybe it's hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake. It's got to go well. And so you want to have my trusted leader talking to a trusted person at this place we're going to do the event at. And I don't think that's going away.

Ben: I agree. I don't think it is either, because there's so much to that. There's so much gray area. There's things in that event process, like we're here at Hunter and we're literally sitting next to a standup thing that's being rebuilt to enhance the experience of that conference. At the end of the day, we still have to push atoms around. AI can't push atoms around. And I think so much of event planning, so much of a salesperson understanding what it is that we're trying to achieve, there's a nuance to that that I don't think AI can really replace.

Josiah: That's so interesting. A year ago we touched a little bit about AI. It's interesting to see how this has all played out. Is there anything else that comes to mind, either in the business or even just you personally, that's getting your attention or driving results and performance?

Ben: On the hotel side of things, I think that there's a lot of noise out there right now, and I think you're hearing a lot of that in the sessions here at Hunter. Last year, I said in January that I thought 2025 was going to be a really good year off of 2024. And then Liberation Day happened, and then this happened, and then that happened. I think a lot of the noise and instability has kind of been baked in now for 2026. I don't think we're going to see drastic RevPAR growth. I think the World Cup is going to be great, and maybe like a 1% nationally for RevPAR, just inflated from that. Which I think is going to be great. It may be a bridge into 2027. But I think just like what Chris Nassetta said yesterday at the conference, he started seeing some really good key indicators at the end of Q4 last year, and that continued into Q1. We are seeing that as well, not in every market, but in enough markets to make me feel like he is right. He's a smart guy. He's seen a lot more than I have. But locally, on a micro level, for me, I'm feeling the same. I think it's getting past that and continuing that momentum. Cut through the noise and let's focus on what really is happening. And I think setting yourself up for when it does come back, and the ADR growth does grow exponentially, that you're able to capture it. Right now we feel like we have done that through 2025 and we're doing that through 2026, and so we'll be able to capitalize when that happens.

Josiah: I love that. I wonder if we could wrap by talking about culture. Even here at the Hunter Conference, some conversations I've been involved in, it feels like culture is the competitive edge or it's one of the competitive edges. And when you and I were talking last year, you were talking about the PEACH culture at Hospitality America. There's so many ways we could go with this. I'm just thinking about all the things that have unfolded for you and the company over the past year. Catch our listeners up a little bit. I can link in the show notes to some places where you talk about this in more detail, but over the past year, how has that PEACH culture played out for you and the company?

Ben: I think it's like what we were just talking about. My experience as an operator coming up through, starting as a night auditor and now a CEO, knowing that when I was a GM, it was all about talent acquisition. I needed to have the right team, the best team for my hotel. And now for the company, it's the exact same. So when I took over in 2022, we were coming out of COVID and it was all about talent acquisition and we needed to differentiate ourselves. So we knew we had a great story. We just needed to be able to tell it. And that was when PEACH came out. What's great about it is everybody that we assessed to bring into the company, they know what they are going to get out of us. And we know then they know what the expectation is of them. So for the listeners, PEACH stands for Passion, Excellence, Adaptability, Community, and Humble. That's what we expect out of everybody in the company. What we've done now since then is that's who we are. Everybody knows that and our associates know it. What we do is we deliver our promises. We make promises every day to our owners, to our guests, and to our team members. We have to deliver on those promises. And so underneath that, we have all of our SOPs to deliver on that. And so it really puts a structure and stability to what we do every single day that we can hold our associates accountable to. They can hold us accountable as well. But we're able to always lean back on the culture that we've built and the expectation that we have around PEACH.

Josiah: I love it. Before we go, what's one thing you're looking forward to this year? I feel like we've talked about so many exciting things across the business, across the industry, potential ahead for you. What's something that gets you jumping out of bed every day and excited about?

Ben: Honestly, it's really our business. Going back to the commercial side, I'm so analytical. I love problem-solving. And when you have the team that we have at Hospitality America from the top to the bottom, it gets you really excited. The reason why passion is the first core value for us is because you have to have that passion every single day for this industry. And if you don't have that, this isn't the business for you. That's fine. I'm confident and very confident that our team, we bring that every single day and when they bring it, I want to bring it. And that's a very addictive type of environment that you want to be a part of. What gets me going in the future is being able to deliver for them, grow the company, and tell our story. I think that 2026 to 2027 are times that we can continue to layer the foundation for that growth. And then the back half of this decade, I think it'll be a baton that we'll all be excited about.

Josiah: Awesome. Ben, it's always a pleasure speaking with you. Appreciate your time.