The #1 Revenue Mistake Hotels Make Every Single Day With Brian Reising

Brian Reising is the Market Vice President for the US and Latin America at SiteMinder, the world's leading hotel commerce platform that helps hotels reach more guests, manage booking channels, and optimize revenue. SiteMinder serves 56,000 hotels across 150 countries, connects properties to more than 450 distribution channels, and facilitates around 140 million reservations annually. Brian helps hoteliers navigate changing traveler demand and increasingly complex distribution strategies. He brings a unique perspective to hospitality, having transitioned into the industry after a career in manufacturing and healthcare technology.

In this episode… What is the most expensive revenue mistake a hotel can make? Leaving rates untouched. That is the answer Brian Reising, Market Vice President for the US and Latin America at SiteMinder, gave host Kin Sio on The Lights On Podcast. Moving a rate up or down by $5, $10, or $20 as occupancy and local events shift is, in Brian's words, the difference between a successful year with an increase in revenue and a standard year with no increase.

Brian came into hospitality from the outside, after early years in engineering and a stretch in healthcare technology. What he found was a tech landscape far more fragmented than he expected, with early adopters gluing systems together to get a full ecosystem. He also found that nothing about a hotel is standard. Bring in an operator from another industry, he says, and they assume hotels are cookie cutter. They are not. Every property sits in a different market with a different hook, a different distribution mix, and a different tech stack, which is why there is no single right answer to how a hotel should sell its rooms.

The practical version of that problem shows up in channel management. Brian says running four OTA connections by hand fails on two fronts. One is time, and independent hoteliers, as he puts it, are some of the busiest people he has ever spoken to in any line of work. The other is information: with no insight into competitor rates or your own performance by channel, pricing is at best a guess. SiteMinder's answer is one dashboard for rates across every connected channel with competitor and channel performance data attached, plus Channels Plus, which sets up and manages the OTA connections and handles the payments. Brian notes that hotels on SiteMinder Pay can be paid in about three days rather than waiting the usual 30 for an OTA to remit.

On direct versus OTA, Br