Hotel Business 101
The 3 Rings That Quietly Decide If Your Hotel Prints Money or Burns It
Most owners open a hotel to fall in love with the lobby. The good ones open one to fall in love with a wheel. Here is the exact model I use with clients, from boutique hotels to national F&B chains.
Ketan Dave
Independent Hospitality Consultant
A hotel is not a building. It is a machine that turns three numbers into profit, or into losses. After fifteen years across McDonald's Asia and ITC Hotels South India, I keep coming back to one simple picture: the Hotel Business Wheel.
Ring 1, Earnings. Rooms, F&B, banquets, spa, walk-ins. A healthy hotel runs on at least three strong streams. If room nights alone pay your bills, one bad season breaks you. Segment your pricing, corporate, OTA, direct and banquet should never see the same rate.
Ring 2, Cost. What leaves your kitchen and rooms. Food, beverage, amenities, supplies. A two percent food cost improvement, through recipe cards, portion control and supplier terms, beats most marketing spends.
Ring 3, Expenses. Salaries, utilities, maintenance, OTA commissions, taxes. Largely fixed, so measure them as a percentage of revenue, not in rupees. Every one percent moved from OTAs to direct bookings is almost pure margin.
Print the wheel. Fill in last month, ring by ring. Circle the smallest one, that is your leak. In nearly every hotel I audit, the answer is not more guests, it is a tighter ring, quietly returning one to three percent of revenue as clean profit.
Ready to fix your wheel?
Book a 30 minute discovery call with Ketan Dave
A short conversation to map your Earnings, Cost and Expenses and identify the fastest profit lever for your hotel or F&B brand.