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, Brian does not pick a side. Most hotels need a mix. A good website and booking engine only takes you so far, because the OTAs are where most travelers still start looking, and ignoring either side leaves money behind. He talks to operators who use Booking.com as their booking engine and nothing else, and who miss the repeat guest revenue that comes from bringing those travelers back direct. On rate parity his advice is blunt: know what you are signing before you sign it. Legacy OTA contracts often made parity a requirement, some hotels now refuse to sign it, and where parity stays, you differentiate on value instead of price with free breakfast, late checkout, a larger room, or adjoining rooms. Kin adds the billboard effect on top: travelers who discover a hotel on an OTA will often check the hotel's own site before booking, which is exactly where those direct perks earn their keep. The blind spot Brian sees most in SiteMinder's data has nothing to do with price. It is guest origin. In one study, a small cohort of hotels was pulling a lot of guests from Brazil. Widen the view and other properties inside that same comp set were getting none, because of the specific channels they were using. He is careful to say other factors were probably involved too, but those hotels simply were not visible to travelers in Brazil, and an entire source market went to someone else. Knowing where guests come from, and then knowing how to keep them, is the piece he says most hoteliers have no visibility into. SiteMinder's newest product, Dynamic Revenue Plus, is built on three pillars: the events coming to your area, what your comp set is charging, and the rate setting itself, either as suggestions you approve or as changes the system makes for you. Brian's caution is about expectations. The AI needs time with your pricing style and the events in your area before its recommendations are worth acting on. Until it has that data set, in his words, "we're not any better than guessing." That is where adoption usually breaks. Kin's version of the same point: software you buy and never drive is a Lamborghini parked in the garage. Brian's rule is simple. The more involved you are in the technology, the more successful you are going to be with it, which means asking questions and using the onboarding and maximization sessions rather than buying a product, ignoring it, and concluding it was not right for you. Kin's addition is to settle ownership before you buy: decide who on the team will operate the tool, and hold that person accountable for learning it, because it is unlikely to be the owner with 17 other things on the daily list. Looking ahead, Brian expects AI assistants to keep reshaping discovery. He did not have a figure to hand, but says the share of bookings coming directly from AI search engines like ChatGPT and Claude is increasing, and that SiteMinder has already connected to MCP, the route into ChatGPT. Guests are describing the exact trip they want instead of typing best hotel in Waikiki, which Kin argues is an opening for smaller properties. AI pulls from OTA listings, Reddit threads, social posts, and LinkedIn, not only your website, and it returns two or three recommendations instead of ten blue links. Being present in more places is now the difference between making that short list and being left off it.