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Almost 40 years ago now I was a busboy at a large and busy resort in the Canadian Rockies. I had transferred west a few months earlier from another hotel in the same chain where I had worked for two years. This is a story about me starting to find my way…

If you read my stuff you are probably familiar with the phrase, “Hospitality is a game of inches.” Yes, it’s true. There is the driving engine of room revenue but almost everything else we need to deal with puts a drag on performance. These things can really slow us down, to use another motorsports analogy. One thing you want…

I didn’t start out in the hotel business with a plan or even any desire to be a financial leader. I was going to be a GM one day. Well, all that changed in 1986.

The large downtown hotel was a big change from the youth-infused Rocky Mountain resort hotel where I…

I am a big fan of the Uniformed System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI), or as she is affectionately called “You Sally.” It has been the guide that our industry uses to properly present financial information for a long…long time, in fact almost 100 years. It lays out the format for our financial statement presentation and essentially…

I read his book, “The Shining,” while working that first winter in the bar at the Algonquin Hotel, in St. Andrews N.B., Canada which is my hometown. The book captivated my imagination about all things supernatural and the hotel. I can say that I had more than one conversation with my Lloyd on some of those lonely nights tending…

The chapter below is an excerpt from my new book. It’s fiction but some of the characters and story lines are based on people I have worked with and events that have taken place in the hotels I have worked in. The book is a fable about a hotel manager who has some very bad habits. He must change…