Bringing Hotel Discipline to Leaner STR Operations

1. You spent close to fifteen years in pure hotel front-office and rooms division operations, from the Taj to Marriott and Anantara brands, before moving into holiday homes and eventually commercial strategy consulting. What from running front desks and rooms divisions inside a branded hotel structure actually carries over when you’re advising STR and holiday home operators who don’t have that same operational scaffolding?

What carries over most is the operational discipline and guest-first mindset.

Hotels taught me that revenue, operations and guest experience are not separate — a room not being ready, poor communication or inconsistent housekeeping can ultimately show up as a bad review and lost revenue. In STR, the same principles apply, but without the large operational structure that hotels provide.

So, a big part of my role in STR has been taking that hotel discipline — SOPs, accountability, quality control and commercial thinking — and creating a leaner version of it for operators who don’t have that infrastructure.

The environment is different, but the fundamentals of delivering the right product, to the right guest, at the right time and at the right price remain the same.

2. Your positioning is direct: most hospitality businesses don’t have a pricing problem, they have a commercial strategy problem. What’s the most common mistake you see STR operators make when they assume a dynamic pricing tool alone will fix a revenue shortfall?

The biggest mistake is treating pricing as the strategy rather than one part of the strategy.

A dynamic pricing tool can tell you what price to charge, but it cannot fix poor positioning, weak listings, low visibility, bad availability, weak conversion, or an uncompetitive product.

I often see operators switch on a pricing tool and expect revenue to improve automatically. But if the property isn’t positioned correctly, the listing isn’t converting, or the distribution strategy is weak, the tool is simply optimising the wrong inputs.

For me, revenue management starts with understanding the entire commercial ecosystem — product, positioning, distribution, demand, conversion and then pricing. The technology is powerful, but only when there is a strategy and human intelligence guiding it.

3. Strategy Cues works across a genuinely unusual spread of markets, from the UK and US to Kenya, Ghana and Puerto Rico. What actually changes in your commercial strategy advice between a mature, saturated market like the UK and an earlier-stage STR market like Kenya or Ghana?

The fundamentals don’t change — the maturity of the market changes the priorities.

In a mature market like the UK, there is usually more competition, more data and more sophisticated operators. The focus is often on micro-positioning, pricing precision, distribution, conversion and gaining share from competitors.

In an earlier-stage market like Kenya or Ghana, the opportunity is often more fundamental: understanding demand patterns, establishing the right pricing architecture, improving distribution and building the basic commercial infrastructure.

So we don’t take a UK strategy and apply it to Kenya or Ghana. We first understand how the market behaves, where demand comes from and how mature the supply side is, and then build the commercial strategy around that.

The technology may be similar, but the sequence of decisions is very different.

4. Strategy Cues is an official sponsor at five STR events across five continents this year, from Dubai to New Zealand to Lyon. For a boutique consultancy, what’s the real return on that level of global event presence, compared with just focusing on client delivery?

For us, the return isn’t simply brand visibility or the number of people we meet. It’s intelligence.

Being present in markets across five continents gives us a much broader view of how the STR industry is evolving — what operators are struggling with, where technology is heading, and how different markets are maturing. That directly feeds back into how we advise our clients.

It also creates relationships that are difficult to build remotely — with operators, technology companies and industry leaders — and some of those relationships turn into partnerships or opportunities for our clients.

So I don’t see events as being separate from client delivery. If we’re spending time away from the business, it needs to make us better at the business. The real ROI is bringing global market intelligence, relationships and ideas back into the work we do every day.