The Spotlight: A Lighthouse Podcast

In this Strategy Lab, Blake Reiter and Daniel Foreman examine a sold-out Saturday night where about half the rooms came from online travel agencies (OTAs) and only one room came from retail. Reservations sold at the same rate are not equally profitable, because OTA commissions reduce what the hotel keeps.

Using the Lighthouse commercial platform, they compare the hotel’s website conversion against two comp sets, find where the booking funnel breaks and trace the problem to frequent OTA rate disparities. They then build website personalization tactics, including a first-time visitor exit message and an automatic price match, to win more direct bookings while parity issues get resolved.

Explore more of Lighthouse’s travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake explores why Washington, DC hotels see weak demand during election week. Lighthouse on the books occupancy data for the Monday through Wednesday of election week shows the 2022 midterm finishing at 63% and the 2024 presidential election at 46%, against 78% to 80% in the non-election weeks of 2023 and 2025. The gap appears early: 2024 stood at 6% on the books 120 days out, versus 10% a year later.

For revenue managers, the data shows that an anti event, a date that suppresses demand, can be forecast months ahead. Listeners will understand how to read lead time buildup, what 2026 pickup suggests for next week and why event-week pricing risks deterring the limited demand that remains.

Explore more of Lighthouse’s travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter examines how Los Angeles hotel demand and pricing for Super Bowl 61 weekend compare with the last two host markets at the same point in time. Super Bowl 61 falls on Sunday, February 14, 2027, which is also Valentine’s Day. At 119 days out, Los Angeles has 27% occupancy on the books, up from 8% for the same weekend last year, while the advertised weekend rate of $326 is up 30% year over year.

Listeners will understand why the Super Bowl premium may arrive as rate rather than a sellout, and why Sunday night is currently priced below Friday. Revenue leaders can use this to review nightly pricing for February 12 to 14.

Explore more of Lighthouse’s travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake explores why hotel guest satisfaction scores reflect a self-selected group of respondents rather than the average guest. Using a hypothetical hotel with 8,500 quarterly stays and 597 survey responses, a 7% response rate, he shows how loyalty members, longer stays and service recovery cases respond at higher rates while disappointed guests stay silent.

For hoteliers, a 4.1 out of 5 score can hide weak repeat business and structural issues such as a low-scoring Monday arrival peak. Listeners will understand how to read survey scores alongside response rate and repeat guest rate, and why segmenting results and tracking behavioral measures reveals issues that guests never report.

Explore more of Lighthouse's travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

When a new hotel lands in your portfolio, you rarely get weeks to learn it. In this Strategy Lab, Blake Reiter and Daniel Foreman take over a boutique hotel as if seeing it for the first time and get ready for a first revenue call in a matter of minutes. They break down the midweek and weekend business mix, build the event calendar, check inherited rate strategy for key events against the competitive set and map demand hot spots and cold spots for the next 90 days.

Using an AI assistant built into the Lighthouse commercial platform, they show how property-specific data replaces guesswork. It helps a revenue manager walk into that first call with clear priorities and a draft presentation.

Explore more of Lighthouse's travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

Hotel teams see more demand data than ever, but the most visible signals are not always the ones that should shape strategy. In this Strategy Lab, Blake Reiter and Daniel Foreman work through a dynamic October weekend at a boutique hotel where a large group block looks strong on paper but has barely picked up. They compare group pickup against occupancy on the books, check rates against the competitive set, review market demand and search length of stay by source market and weigh how much a local family event will contribute.

Using the Lighthouse commercial platform, they show how to separate the signals that should change pricing and group decisions from the ones that only add noise. They then turn what matters into specific rate adjustments and targeted promotions.

Explore more of Lighthouse's travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter explores how selling the last room on a compression night can cost a hotel more than it earns. Using a hypothetical 200-room downtown property at 199 rooms sold on a Wednesday, he shows how a $189 one-night booking displaces a four-night stay worth $944, including $755 on Thursday through Saturday nights that finish the week with empty rooms.

Blake explains why this loss rarely appears in standard reports, how a two-night minimum stay and a step-down minimum stay can protect inventory, and why the approach carries risk if multi-night demand does not materialize. Listeners will understand how to review 90 days of arrivals and denials data to decide when length of stay restrictions improve revenue across the whole week.

Explore more of Lighthouse's travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

Ocean City, Maryland topped Lighthouse's Market Demand Index for summer 2026, yet its hotels cut prices year over year. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter unpacks the disconnect: short term rental supply in Ocean City grew more than 21%, while occupancy and gross ADR for those properties both climbed, absorbing demand that hotels expected to capture. The same pattern shows up in Rapid City, Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, and Destin.

For commercial and revenue leaders, the lesson is that flat or falling hotel rates in a high demand market don't always signal weak demand. They may signal that guests are booking short term rentals instead.

Explore more of Lighthouse's travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

A hotel beats its monthly occupancy forecast by six tenths of a point, and the room celebrates. But averaging 30 days of forecasted and actual occupancy can hide daily misses of eight, twelve, even sixteen percentage points. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter explains why over-forecasts and under-forecasts don't cancel out operationally, even when they cancel out on paper.

Blake walks through how a 12-point over-forecast drives excess labor and food waste, while a 16-point under-forecast strains front desk and housekeeping staffing and can surface in guest reviews. The lesson: measure forecast accuracy in absolute terms, not net averages, and look for where daily misses cluster.

Explore more of Lighthouse's travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake explores what happened to hotel pricing in Abilene, Texas, home to Stargate, the $500 billion AI data center project announced by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank in January 2025. Actualized pricing was flat in the low $90s through 2024, then climbed to a peak of $243 a night by March 2026, up about 126% comparing the first seven months of 2026 to the same stretch in 2024.

Blake breaks down why a single mega-project can outweigh a market's traditional seasonality, and what revenue managers in similarly sized markets should watch for before the next big build lands.

Explore more of Lighthouse's travel & hospitality research: mylh.co/spotlightinsights