Why We Turn Away More Hotels Than We Take
A mandate we accept is one we are prepared to be held financially responsible for. Most are not.
It is an unusual thing to advertise, but we decline the majority of the hotels we assess. This is not exclusivity for its own sake, nor a marketing posture dressed up as principle. It is a direct consequence of how the firm is built, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Because our reward is tied to the revenue we actually recover, a mandate only makes sense where there is genuine, measurable loss to recover — and enough of it to justify the work for both parties. Where the assessment finds a hotel already running its direct channel well, there is little left to bring back. Taking the engagement anyway would mean charging for a result we could not honestly deliver.
So we say so, in the same conversation, and we stop there. There is no second call, no softened version of the same pitch a fortnight later. A hotel that does not need us is told plainly that it does not need us — and, more often than the owner expects, that is the most valuable thing we can offer them, because it is the one thing no one selling marketing will ever say.
This has a cost to us, and it is meant to. A firm paid on activity can afford to take every client and let the weakest engagements quietly underperform. A firm paid on results cannot. Each mandate we accept ties a part of our income to whether we actually move the number, which means every mandate we should not have taken is a loss we carry ourselves. The discipline of refusal is simply that logic, applied honestly at the door rather than regretted later.
It also keeps the firm small on purpose. We would rather hold a handful of mandates we believe in than a full book we cannot stand behind. A smaller book means each hotel is genuinely known — its season, its channel mix, its particular leak — rather than processed. It means the person who reads your first enquiry is the person accountable for your result.
There is a discipline in the refusal that a hotelier can feel, and it changes how the eventual yes is heard. When a firm has visibly declined others, its agreement is not flattery; it is a judgement it has staked its own income on. A hotelier who has been told, plainly, that they qualify — and told just as plainly what would happen if the recovery failed — is being offered something rarer than enthusiasm. They are being offered accountability.
So the free assessment is not a funnel dressed up as generosity. It is a genuine filter, applied in both directions: it tells the hotel whether there is enough to recover, and it tells us whether we can honestly take the work. Most often, on one side or the other, the answer is no — and saying it quickly, before anyone has spent anything, is the whole point.
The hotels we do take on are, by design, the ones where the number is real and the recovery is ours to be judged on. That is a narrower business than most. It is also the only kind of business a firm can build if it intends to be paid on the truth.