Consulting services for hotel operations

This page is for you if you run a hotel and feel that day-to-day operations — staffing, booking flow, pricing, routines — take more effort than they should, and you want help from someone who has been there themselves, not just read about it.

How it works

1. Operational review — a review of current operations: staff structure, booking flow, housekeeping and reception routines, and which key metrics are already tracked today (and which are missing).
2. Prioritisation — identifying which areas will have the greatest effect if addressed first, rather than trying to solve everything at once.
3. Action plan — concrete, achievable steps rather than a generic strategy report that ends up gathering dust.
4. Implementation together with your staff — support in actually putting the changes into practice in day-to-day operations, not just recommendations on paper.
5. Follow-up against key metrics — the results are measured against the metrics set at the outset.

Strategic planning, processes and revenue management — grounded in hands-on operations

Strategic planning that starts from the floor, not from a template. The difference between an external consultant's report and a proposal that can actually be carried out usually comes down to detailed knowledge: if you know what it is like to stand at reception at two in the morning with a double booking, you take that into account when proposing changes to the booking flow. I owned and ran Vejby Strand Hotel operationally from 2013 to 2024 (and still own half of it) — the plans I propose are ones I would myself have needed to be able to carry out with the staffing and budget a hotel of that size actually has.

Process optimisation. Check-in/check-out, housekeeping routines tied to occupancy rather than a fixed schedule, and reducing duplicated work between reception and housekeeping are often where the most time is lost in day-to-day operations — not in the big strategic decisions.

Staff development. The hotel industry has high staff turnover, and most of what is usually called "staff development" in a generic consultant's report never takes hold in practice. Alongside running the hotel, I have led recruitment and skills development of technical consulting teams (as a group manager at ÅF AB) — the same basic questions of staffing, performance follow-up and salary reviews apply, just with different roles.

Key metrics that actually drive decisions. Occupancy on its own does not say very much — RevPAR (revenue per available room), ADR (average daily rate) and staff cost per room together give a much clearer picture of whether the business is actually heading in the right direction.

Revenue management. A concrete example rather than a theoretical description: as owner of Vejby Strand Hotel, I personally designed and implemented the XML integration between the hotel's property management system and Expedia's booking platform in 2015 — importing bookings, updating availability and rates on Expedia, with support for automated revenue management built into the solution. That is the difference between describing how revenue management should work and having built it. See also technology integration for how this kind of connection fits together with other systems.

Common pitfalls

• Copying a hotel chain's template wholesale, without adapting it to your size, guest profile and actual staffing.
• Optimising a single area (e.g. just pricing) without seeing how it affects staff workload elsewhere.
• Measuring the wrong metrics — only occupancy, without taking RevPAR or staff costs into account.
• Introducing changes without getting buy-in from the staff who have to live with them every day.
• Letting the report gather dust on a shelf instead of becoming a plan that is actually carried out and followed up.
• Not appointing a clear internal owner for each action, so that nothing falls through the cracks once the consultant has left.

What it costs

The cost depends on how much of the business is to be reviewed and how much support is needed in the implementation phase, not just in the planning. We review your particular business first and produce a realistic cost estimate based on that, rather than a standard price.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this relevant for a small hotel, or only for large chains?

The starting point is a boutique or full-service hotel of the size I ran myself — not a model built for a large chain and then scaled down.

How does this differ from a generic management consultant?

By having owned and run the hotel operationally myself for eleven years, not just advised on how it should be done.

Do you come with ready-made solutions, or do we work them out together?

Together — an action plan that does not have your staff's buy-in is rarely carried out, however good it looks on paper.

Do we need to pause operations to implement the changes?

No, the work is planned so that it can be carried out alongside ongoing operations, at the pace the business allows.

How do we measure whether it actually delivered results?

Against the key metrics set in the operational review — the same metrics are followed up again once the action plan has been carried out.

Can we pick individual parts, e.g. just revenue management, instead of the whole package?

Yes, the parts can be ordered separately, depending on where the need is greatest right now.