How do you ensure every hotel in your portfolio thrives—not just survives—without drowning in complexity? Optimizing the performance of a portfolio of hotels can be daunting. Each property comes with its own unique needs, strengths, and challenges, operates in different market dynamics, and is led by teams with diverse perspectives and skills.
As a commercial leader, you might consider addressing each hotel’s needs individually. This makes sense in many ways, but is not easily scalable. I would like to suggest that there is a more effective solution—one that helps every hotel in your portfolio rise together, while also helping preserve your sanity.
Think back to the days before GPS, when navigators relied on the steady glow of the North Star, Polaris, as their point of reference. People from different parts of the world used that constant beacon to ensure they were all heading in the same direction.
Now, imagine applying that same principle to your organization. Consider a key metric that defines success for your company right now—a single guiding star to align your efforts across all properties.
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One Metric to Rule Them All: Using GOP as Your North Star
Let us focus on profitability—specifically, improving Gross Operating Profit (GOP). Picture measuring GOP each month over the course of a year, with a focus on year-over-year improvement. As you break that down for each hotel in your portfolio, each team then has a specific outcome to focus their sights on.
By embracing GOP as your North Star, you create a unified focus that encourages every hotel to move in the same profitable direction. If each hotel sets its own primary objective—or worse, multiple unclear objectives—success becomes ambiguous, and collaboration suffers.
Imagine, at a quarterly leadership meeting, you share that the primary focus for the coming year will be improving GOP. To make this tangible, you set a clear target: GOP improvement of 10% Year Over Year (YOY) for each property by month-end reporting. This target is not arbitrary—it aligns every decision with the goal of enhancing profitability.
Each property is then tasked with answering the question: “How can we improve our monthly GOP?” The clarity of a single metric ensures that everyone is working toward the same outcome, even if the strategies differ from one hotel to another.
Proven Tactics to Boost GOP Across Your Hotels
With GOP as the focus, the leadership team can begin to brainstorm practical initiatives for implementation at the property level. Some examples include:
- Driving Shoulder Night Occupancy
Story: At one city property, the team noticed a dip in occupancy on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. By launching a targeted promotion for mid-week stays, they increased occupancy by 15% on shoulder nights, directly contributing to higher GOP. - Boosting Premium Room Upsells
Story: A resort property identified that guests were frequently booking standard rooms. By training front desk staff on effective upsell techniques and offering package incentives for premium rooms, the resort boosted premium room bookings, leading to a 7% increase in room revenue, which positively impacted GOP. - Optimizing Ad Spend for Need Dates
Story: A hotel in a competitive market reallocated its advertising budget to focus on “need dates” when demand was highest. By using data analytics to adjust ad campaigns in real time, the hotel reduced cost per acquisition and increased occupancy during high-demand periods, contributing to a better GOP margin.
By exchanging and exploring practical solutions, teams can learn from their peers and discover fresh ways to tackle challenges and drive results—setting the stage for the next step in the process.
A Smarter Way to Brainstorm
A clear, focused approach ensures the best ideas rise to the top.
- Idea Generation:
- Kickstart brainstorming by setting a 5-minute timer. Leaders and managers are invited to write down as many ideas as possible on how to boost monthly GOP—one per sticky note—focusing on volume over quality.
- Prioritization:
- Each idea is evaluated on two scales:
- Effort (1-10): How much work and how many resources are required?
- Potential Impact (1-10): How significantly could it boost GOP?
- Leaders transfer their ratings from the sticky notes onto a spreadsheet. For example, “Driving Shoulder Night Occupancy” might score a 4 on effort and an 8 on impact for their specific hotel.
- Selecting Top Objectives:
- After discussion and rating, each hotel selects the 2 to 4 ideas that show the best potential for their specific property: low-to-moderate effort, with high impact.
- These become the specific objectives for the next quarter.
Accountability That Drives Profits
Even the best strategies can fall flat without a system to track progress and ensure follow-through. Clear accountability transforms ideas into trackable success, aligning teams and keeping every property focused on the bigger goal. Without it, initiatives risk becoming abandoned projects rather than sustainable improvements.
A structured two-part accountability framework can keep properties on track:
- Key Results and Reporting:
- After each property selects its top 2 to 4 objectives from the brainstorming session, clear key results are defined for each initiative. For example:
- Shoulder Night Occupancy: Increase occupancy on Tuesday and Wednesday nights by 10% month-over-month.
- Premium Room Upsells: Achieve a 5% increase in premium room revenue per month.
- Create monthly reporting to track these metrics—each objective should ultimately lead to improving the North Star metric of GOP improvement.
- Each property is required to present a short report at the end of each quarter.
- After each property selects its top 2 to 4 objectives from the brainstorming session, clear key results are defined for each initiative. For example:
- Establish a Feedback Loop:
- The corporate team holds monthly check-ins with property managers. These check-ins are to review progress against the GOP improvement target, discuss what is working, and adjust strategies as needed.
- Sharing success stories and challenges as a team helps refine strategies and drives continuous improvement across the portfolio.
The Big Picture: Aligning Individual Success with Portfolio Growth
By selecting GOP as the North Star metric, your leadership team creates a clear, focused objective that aligns every property toward profitability. Through structured brainstorming and prioritization, each hotel can customize its approach—by selecting its own top objectives—while still contributing to the overall portfolio goal.
This process not only drives accountability but also builds a culture of collaboration, where every team member understands how their local tactics feed into a larger, unified strategy. When every property is aligned and measured against a shared profitability target, the cumulative effect is a significant boost to the portfolio’s overall performance.
In today’s competitive market, the alignment of individual strategies with a unified North Star is not merely an exercise in management—it is the pathway to sustainable growth and operational excellence.