budget & finance
Hospitality Financial Leadership: What Is the Only Thing We Know for Sure About the Hotel Budget?
David Lund | April 25, 2022
By David Lund The budget is a BIG deal. Heck, it consumes so much time and energy in the hotel. Getting it right is a critical element to any branded, managed hotel. If you are reading this and you do not prepare an annual budget, you are probably scratching your head and wondering what I am talking about. Read all about how to prepare a budget right here. In your average hotel, the budget process is a two- to three-month deal. It means, or it should mean, each key manager is implicated in doing their part by preparing and negotiating the payroll and expenses for the department they manage. The annual gut-wrenching process we call...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: What to Do in a Financial Crisis
David Lund | March 9, 2020
By David Lund A lot has been said about the flu outbreak and the devastating effects it will have on the travel and hotel industry. But what can you do about it? The old saying, “You can’t save your way to prosperity,” still holds true, but you can be the best of class when it comes to being the least affected. Occupancy and rates are going to fall, they always do. The question is, where will the market go and how can we keep our REVPAR index? I’ll leave that piece for the revenue and marketing pundits. Here is a list of the top 10 things you can do today to mitigate the financial tsunami that’s coming. I have lived and manage...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: Nobody Gets to Be Wrong, Everyone is Wrong, No One Gets to Be Right, Everyone is Right
David Lund | April 15, 2019
By David Lund I use this quote to start many of my workshops. To me it's the way I want the participants to stand in their individual power during our time together. It's also how I see our industry. In the hotel business we all need to have an opinion and even more important we need to be able to share those thoughts. Reason being is, we all have something important to bring to the table. That's what I tell my workshop participants. To illustrate this, I often ask the following question. "What would you rather have to increase your GOP in your 300-room hotel that is currently operating at 75% occupancy with a $150 average rate, a $4 ro...
Hospitality Financial Leadership: Trading Places
David Lund | October 29, 2018
Circa 2009. Late September. I'm the regional controller for five hotels. Sitting at my desk minding my own business, doing my own work when the phone rings. It's an old friend, one-time assistant, and now the regional controller based at a hotel in another city. He explained the desire to move back to where I was but was not having much luck finding a job. His homesick wife really wanted their children educated at home. We chatted for a few moments and caught up on different topics. Then he said, "Hey, David, how about we trade jobs?" "Can we do that?" I asked. Then I thought, "Wow, it's 28 years after the high school summer I planned t...
