Hospitality Financial Leadership: Why Does It Take So Bloody Long to Do the Annual Hotel Budget?

David Lund | September 8, 2020

By David Lund Bloody is a great word. It’s English and I’m Canadian so that’s close enough and I’m adopting it for this piece. The word is so descriptive, and it immediately conjures up images of battle and of great suffering. Much the same as the annual carnage we refer to as budget season in the hotel business. It’s the epic contest between line managers and executives, hotel leadership teams and the brand and hotels and their owners. In some hotels it can take six months to get the budget done, revised umpteen times and eventually – hopefully – approved. It’s nothing for the battle to last for three months in a typica...