The right hotels are already asking harder questions about where their profit is going. Here's what a room full of them had to say about it.
Revenue is growing. But where is it going?
- +19% - Global RevPAR growth since 2019
- +25% - Booking costs per available room, same period
- 37% - Average flow-through globally
Those three numbers opened PERFORM 2026 — and they set the tone for everything that followed. Alex Zoghlin and Michael Grove put the margin squeeze plainly: hotels are doing more business than ever before, but a growing share of that revenue is leaving through the back door before it hits the bottom line.
The problem often isn't that hotels are pricing badly, it's that they can’t clearly see where their money is going once it comes in. E.g. two hotels can post identical RevPAR and land in completely different profit positions depending on channel mix, labor model, and how much non-room revenue they're capturing amongst a host of other complexities.
PERFORM’s sessions looked at this challenge in detail, as well as the way forward. Here are six key takeaways.
1. The revenue manager role is changing.
Alex Zoghlin and Michael Grove framed it in the opening session: the discipline of revenue management is shifting from managing revenue to commercial performance engineering — owning not just rate decisions but distribution, guest intelligence, and P&L accountability together. Throughout the day, the point came up repeatedly that the revenue managers making that leap are the ones using data to change how their whole organization understands cost, channel, and commercial performance. In their roundtable, Grupo Posadas were a case in point — years of deliberate work to embed profit thinking across the organization, not just within the revenue team. The tools got them started. The mindset is what sustained it.
Getting teams to think strategically about profit at every level — not just within the revenue department — is what separates the hotels consistently outperforming their competitive sets from the ones still catching up.
2. RevPAR is the wrong scorecard.
Several sessions explored ways to expand beyond RevPAR — and the case was consistent. It tells you how much came in, not how much stayed. Metrics like GOPPAR, TRevPAR, and net ADR give a fuller picture. Once you apply distribution costs to your top booking sources, the channel generating the most gross revenue is often not the channel generating the most profit. If profitability isn't on the weekly scorecard, you're optimizing for the wrong number.
3. The room is the vehicle, not the product.
Golf revenue grew 8% in 2025. Wellness grew 6.2%. The demand for non-room spend is there — but most hotels are still treating a booking as a room transaction rather than the first touchpoint in a total guest spend journey. Casinos and airlines figured this out long ago. Nevin Reed's session drew the line clearly: when you understand a guest's total value — room spend plus F&B, spa, gaming, or whatever the property offers — the pricing and displacement decisions look completely different. Margaritaville also touched on driving ancillary spend, sharing how their revenue team took ownership of upsells, managing them as a structured revenue stream rather than leaving them to chance at check-in. The airlines panel made the same case at scale — a booking is just the first touchpoint in a total guest spend journey.
4. Too many systems — AI is the connective tissue.
Bob Matsuoka's session opened with a number worth sitting with: revenue managers in most hotels spend 60% of their day compiling data and generating reports rather than making decisions. Most hotel technology stacks were assembled over years, from different vendors, solving different problems — so connecting them is complex. Revenue managers end up as the translator every morning, bridging systems that were never designed to talk to each other. AI changes this equation — not by replacing those systems, but by acting as the layer that connects them. As Bob put it: "AI is not going to give you expertise or judgment. What it does is give the people who already have that judgment a power they've never had before to work with data at scale." James Osmond from Triptease's session noted that two-thirds of hoteliers believe integrated systems unlock 6% or more in annual revenue. The gap between knowing that and closing it is still wide for most.
5. Siloed teams are a profit problem.
The hotels outperforming their competitive sets are the ones that have broken down the walls between revenue, sales, marketing, and operations. One commercial strategy, not four. Once sales and revenue are working from the same displacement and profitability model, the nature of the conversation between those teams changes entirely. Full profit visibility on every group inquiry changes how both teams operate. The case was made for the same alignment between revenue and marketing — revenue shows you what guests spent; marketing explains how they discovered you and why they chose you. Aligning those two functions around the same commercial strategy is where the next layer of performance lives.
6. Benchmarking turns a P&L from a record into a decision tool.
Your P&L tells you what happened. The harder question is what to do about it — and without external context, the answer is often a guess. Outrigger demonstrated what changes when benchmarking is part of the operating model: across 31 properties, Outrigger consistently outperforms its competitive sets in some of the most rate-transparent and competitive markets in the world, including Waikiki and Thailand. The finance roundtable made the same case from a different angle — when benchmarking data is layered onto your own P&L, patterns that looked like performance become visible as structural issues, and vice versa. The teams getting the most from this are the ones using external context to challenge internal assumptions and prioritize where to act first.
What Monday morning looks like.
Four starting points from PERFORM:
- Start measuring what you actually want to improve. If profitability isn't on your weekly scorecard, it won't drive daily decisions. Add GOPPAR, net ADR, and channel cost to your regular review — even informally to begin with. The number you track is the number you manage.
- Audit your channel mix through a profit lens. Pull your top booking sources and calculate what actually reaches the bottom line after distribution costs. The channel generating the most gross revenue is often not the channel generating the most profit — and for most hotels, that gap is bigger than expected.
- Start small with AI — the data you already have is enough. Bob Matsuoka's session made the practical case: take your existing data exports, spreadsheets, or CSV downloads from your RMS and upload them into Claude or another AI tool (on a paid plan), and ask it to surface something you don't already know. These insights can be the fuel for your profit strategy.
- Focus on breaking one silo. Pick the biggest disconnect in your commercial operation — revenue and sales, revenue and finance, or revenue and marketing — and find one shared metric to align around. Noble House did it with group displacement. Outrigger did it with GOPPAR benchmarking. It doesn't need to be everything at once.
Every session at PERFORM 2026 pointed in the same direction. The hotels asking harder questions about profit today are the ones who'll have better answers tomorrow.