ShareTess McGoldrick, Senior Director Product Enablement, Lighthouse, HSMAI Sales Advisory Board Member
This article is a summary of Dr. Breffni Noone & Dr. Sherri Kimes’ presentation at the recent HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference.
The provocative title is intentional — this research-backed session challenged a core assumption: that better tools produce better decisions. Based on 22 interviews and 194 surveys across hoteliers, owners, asset managers, vendors, and consultants, the answer is no.
Why It Matters
The industry has invested heavily in RMS, forecasting, dashboards, and AI — and manual overrides are still rampant, data is still fragmented, and profit is still inconsistently optimized. More capability has not translated into better decisions. The problem isn’t execution. It’s system design.
Key Insights
The data is striking: 54% of respondents override their RMS regularly, 79% describe their tech stack as poorly or critically fragmented, and just 1% say their data is well integrated. Meanwhile, 47% still measure success primarily through RevPAR — versus only 24% who prioritize profitability.
The shift to ‘Commercial’ integration happened at the title level, not the structural level. RM, Sales, and Marketing may share an org chart, but incentives and ways of working remained siloed. As one interviewee put it: “We all just have more meetings about the silos now.
Revenue Management has quietly become a coordination function — balancing revenue vs. profit, reconciling owner and operator expectations, and interpreting conflicting data — without being given the authority or accountability to match. AI won’t fix this. It will accelerate whatever system you already have, broken or not.
Next Steps (or homework as the professors would say)
- Compare what RM is expected to optimize with what is actually measured and rewarded. Review scorecards, incentive plans, and KPIs — and ask whether profitability influences decisions or just appears in reports.
- Map RM’s actual decision authority against its expected influence. Find one recent decision where RM shaped the outcome but didn’t own accountability.
- Ask whether your organization has invested as much in executing decisions as in generating insights — and whether the gap is analytical, organizational, or structural.