The Spotlight: A Lighthouse Podcast

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 hotel...

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 competit...

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 compet...

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 expla...

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 Cit...

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 thr...

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...

A 44-day average booking lead time sounds like a clear signal, but it blends 3 completely different traveler types: corporate guests booking 8 days out, leisure guests booking 60 days out and groups booking 80 days or more. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake explores why blended averages like lead time and length of stay can trigger the wrong pricing, marketing and staffing decisions. Using a hy...

Advertised three-star hotel prices in North America are up 3.7% for the second half of 2026, while five-star prices are down 20.5%, a 24-point gap in the same region and months. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake breaks down Lighthouse's newly released State of Global Hospitality Pricing report, covering the H1 2026 recap and H2 2026 outlook. Blake walks through regional pricing trends across Eu...

Golf's four majors had very different effects on hotel pricing in their host cities this year. The US Open at Shinnecock Hills sent Suffolk County, New York, hotel rates up 106% year over year, while the Open Championship in Liverpool rose 80% and the PGA Championship lifted Philadelphia 18%. The Masters in Augusta was the outlier, falling 37%, the only major to post a year-over-year decline. In t...

The World Cup's 104 matches across 16 host cities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada drove sharp swings in hotel and short-term rental pricing. Blake breaks down which cities saw the biggest year-over-year gains, why Guadalajara and Monterrey topped the charts despite starting as the lowest-priced markets in 2025, and how demand indices actually cooled between January 1 and June 1 even as ki...

Every July, Pamplona's Running of the Bulls draws thousands of visitors during Spain's San Fermín Festival. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter breaks down how hotel pricing moved this year, from a modest 3% citywide rate increase to a sharp divergence beneath it: independent hotels raised rates 5.4% while chains cut theirs 3.1%. He also looks at how short term rentals outpaced hotels on b...

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake explores how hotel pricing power shifted across the two weeks of the 2026 Wimbledon championships. Week one delivered a 17% average year-over-year price gain, with every day posting positive growth, while week two averaged just 9%, with prices falling 12% below 2025 levels on final Sunday. Blake explains why the 2025 tournament carried a pricing premium tied to...

AI in hospitality has moved past the buzzword stage. In this live episode of The Spotlight, recorded on stage at Lighthouse's Luminate conference, Daniel Foreman sits down with Kevin Patel, Vice President of Revenue Management at Scarlett Hotel Group, and Rob Spanos, Director of Asset Management at Noble Investment Group, to talk about what artificial intelligence actually looks like inside a hote...

Revenue calls tend to default to the same weekly talking points, leaving little room to surface anything new under time pressure. In this Strategy Lab, Blake Reiter and Daniel Foreman use Ernest, Lighthouse's AI teammate, to generate three fresh topics for a hotel's upcoming revenue call in a matter of minutes. They then validate each recommendation inside the Lighthouse commercial platform, check...

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter explores which United States hotel markets captured the largest pricing premiums over July 4th weekend, comparing 2026 results to 2025 ahead of America's 250th Independence Day. Ocean City, Maryland led at 286% of its annual average pricing, followed by Traverse City, Michigan, boosted by its 100th National Cherry Festival, and South Padre Island, Texas....

Santorini and Mykonos sit in the same Cyclades archipelago, but their 2026 pricing trends have pulled sharply apart. Santorini hotel rates are up 35% in May and 31% in June year over year, with July advertised pricing up 16%. Mykonos hotel rates are down 3% in May, 8% in June, and 9% in July on the same basis. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter examines what short-term rental data reveals...

The 2026 FIFA World Cup's group stage delivered a mixed picture for hotel occupancy across US host cities. Boston led the pack, building strong on-the-books occupancy as early as six months out, while Atlanta lagged behind due to a Monday kickoff and deeper hotel supply. By the closing group stage matchups, those early gaps narrowed sharply, with most cities reaching 85 percent occupancy or higher...

Booking windows across Asia Pacific span from 20 days to 85 days, and that gap changes how hoteliers should plan their marketing calendar. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake explores Lighthouse Benchmark data from 7 Asia Pacific destinations in 2025, comparing booking windows and search windows market by market. Tokyo travelers plan nearly 3 months ahead with almost no gap between searching and...

When performance metrics, pace insights, and market benchmarks live in separate tools, revenue teams struggle to agree on the right move. In this Strategy Lab, Blake Reiter and Daniel Foreman show how working from a shared data foundation speeds up group displacement decisions — using a fictional wedding block RFP as the example: 10 rooms for 2 nights on a weekend a 60-room boutique hotel is alrea...

The 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow are driving a 153% increase in advertised hotel pricing compared to the same dates in 2025. But the more significant shift is structural: the Games compress the normal weekly pricing curve, with the largest year-over-year lifts landing on days that were historically discounted. Midweek nights like Thursday, July 30 are advertising 213% above last year's rates...

On May 7, ChatGPT began pushing more responses that included outbound links to hotel websites — and the traffic data shows it immediately. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter walks through what the numbers look like before and after that date, including a 50%+ increase in AI-originated traffic as a share of organic search, jumping from roughly 2% to over 3%. The data makes clear that AI is...

ChatGPT now has 900 million users, and booking platforms are embedded in its ecosystem. A growing share of hotel decisions starts with an AI prompt, not a search engine. This episode presents original research from Lighthouse: 4,545 prompts across 9 global markets and 5 traveler personas, surfacing patterns in which hotels ChatGPT mentions, how often, and why. The data shows AI invisibility is the...

The Sundance Film Festival's move from Park City, Utah to Boulder, Colorado is already reshaping hotel demand and pricing patterns ahead of its first year in its new home. Boulder hotel rates during the festival period are currently advertised more than 3 times higher than comparable dates a year earlier, while demand has more than doubled. In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter explores how...

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake Reiter explores how Madrid's return to Formula One is already reshaping hotel demand ahead of the city's first Grand Prix in 45 years. Advertised hotel rates for race weekend are more than double comparable 2025 levels, highlighting the scale of pricing power tied to major global events. Blake also examines direct booking data, revealing longer booking windows,...