Hotel owners wrestle with numerous costs in the operation of their businesses, from staffing to paying sales taxes to expenses associated with maintaining the building. Fortunately, the federal tax code equips businesses in the hospitality industry with an array of incentives and strategies to help offset these costs. However, these potentially lucrative opportunities for tax savings are often overlooked by businesses that are unaware how to capture them. By reexamining their tax-planning strategies, hoteliers may uncover substantial savings that will reduce their tax burdens and improve the cash flow of their businesses. READ MORE

As a revenue management professional, it can become all too easy to get bogged down in focusing on rooms revenue in efforts to increase ADR and drive RevPAR. After all, these are the metrics by which we compare against our comp set on weekly STR reports and, quite often, the numbers used to grade our performance. However, as the practice of revenue management matures, and an increasing number of technology companies are providing the industry with newer and more optimal functionality, the focus needs to shift from primarily revenue generation to optimizing total profitability of the whole hotel. READ MORE

Classical and even more current revenue optimization practices and technologies have focused too narrowly on maximizing room revenue, and more recently, to minimizing the distribution and marketing costs associated with that revenue. Expanding the same practice to other revenue streams has been a natural next step for some revenue managers and systems, but the higher that revenues go, the more profit margin that seems to leak out of the balance sheet. A new practice called Hospitality Enterprise Optimization, using the proven analytical abilities of revenue managers and the systems at their disposal, will go a long way to finding that lost profit. READ MORE

The ever changing distribution landscape can be challenging to maneuver. Costly connectivity solutions often result in some degree of manual management of varied channels, which is time consuming. The good news is that a hotel usually finds a way to get content, rates, and availability out to the customer in some way. The bad news is that, often, this information is not optimized for particular customers, which can result in a lost booking. Understanding more about which customers book what sites and delivering the content and availability optimally to them is critical to a hotel's success at any distribution point. READ MORE

Is it a mirage or are hotel condominiums making a strong comeback from the depths of the recession? Like everything else in real estate, it depends on location, location, location. In a select few cities, where the residential real estate market is only surpassed by the hotel industry (Miami, Los Angeles, and New York City), development is strong. Looking beyond these core cities to the nation as a whole, the resurgence has been slow and steady. READ MORE