Heidi Cosio, CRME

As Senior Vice President of Revenue Strategy at Aimbridge Hospitality, I led revenue and distribution for more than 1,000 hotels across the United States and the Caribbean. The hotel count isn’t really the hard part. We operated sixty brands, which means sixty sets of standards, systems, rate structures and brand.com dynamics running at the same time, and four different asset types underneath them that all price differently.

The cohort that matters most for this role sits at the right of that bar. The independents and the soft brands had to generate their own demand rather than inherit it, and more than sixty of them carried no flag at all. The portfolio ran from economy select service up through luxury, lifestyle and destination resorts, including a handful of all-inclusive resorts, where pricing resolves to pax rather than rooms and most revenue management systems stop being useful.

I ran distribution myself for the first year before I built the function and hired a Director of Distribution under me. I mention that on purpose: I know what the function needs because I did the work before I staffed it.

The trap. Coming out of the pandemic we were seeing exceptional demand, but we were still carrying a lot of discounted business — travel nurse contracts, group rates that had been set too low, 25%-off advance purchase promotions. Instead of addressing those, people were just raising their retail price point. They priced themselves out of the demand, and their ADR still didn’t improve, because they couldn’t see what was actually holding it down.

The reason. People were looking at STR, seeing that their rate wasn’t moving, and stopping there. Nobody was getting to the underlying cause, because the reporting to do that didn’t really exist at the time.

What I built. A framework that showed actual consumption by segment and value on the left, and a space on the right to play with it. If I remove this corporate account, or cap the contract business, or drop the advance purchase promotion, what does that do to my ADR? I automated the reporting into our internal financial reporting system and ran the training company-wide.

What it unlocked. Once people could see the trade in front of them, they were willing to make a move most of them wouldn’t have made on their own: bring retail down to the price point the market actually supports, cut the low-value base, book fewer rooms, and let occupancy come down on purpose so ADR could come up.

Where the resistance came from. It didn’t come from ownership. Owners were already pushing for rate, because insurance and operating costs had gone up to the point where the low-rate business wasn’t covering itself anymore, and they knew it. Operations and the GMs wanted a turnaround too. The pushback came from sales, who were still in the heads-in-beds mindset from 2020. I didn’t get them there with a mandate. I gave them a black-and-white view of the trade and let them pick the easiest cut first, and the result made them willing to try the next one.

We proved it small, let the results do the convincing, built it into onboarding so it would survive turnover, and then automated it so it ran without us. That is how I would go about setting operating standards at Peregrine. The last step is the one most programs skip: once the reporting was automated we could pull forward mix as well as historical, so a hotel sitting group-heavy three months out could do something about it then instead of explaining it later.

Take the flag away and you haven’t lost a logo, you’ve lost a demand engine, and you have to build a replacement out of channels you pick deliberately. That’s why independent revenue strategy is a distribution problem before it’s a pricing problem.

I led strategy for more than sixty true independents at Aimbridge, plus a soft-branded cohort that operated much the same way. What I learned running them:

Eighteen months at Lighthouse has given me a look across a lot of independent hotels instead of one operator’s portfolio. Four things go wrong over and over:

That last one is really a distribution cost problem, not a marketing problem. Every booking an independent wins because an assistant surfaced it is a booking that didn’t pay 15 to 25% to an OTA. It’s the cheapest channel available and right now nobody is competing for it.

That’s the opportunity in Peregrine’s independent portfolio I’d want to go after first.

I approach it with transparency and with data, and I take the emotion out of it. When the numbers are good the emotion doesn’t matter much. When they’re bad it’s the only thing that can sink you. Below is the sequence I use, with the example running through it — the case I built to get an executive team to fund an enterprise business intelligence platform they hadn’t asked for.

The part I would underline for an ownership audience isn’t the savings. It is that I made the case and then I delivered it. When an executive team approves capital on a technology argument, what they are really asking is whether it is going to land, or whether it is going to take eighteen months and a consultant to sort out. This one was live in ninety days.

Before. Distribution came to us inbound and fragmented. A hotel would sign its own agreement, the vendor would push that contact up to corporate, and a lot of what my team did was manage what the individual hotels had already done rather than go find the right partners in the first place.

What I changed. We stopped waiting for vendors to come to us through hotels and went to where the buyers were. At IPW in San Antonio in 2023 we sat down with a new operator or wholesaler every fifteen minutes for three days, and we qualified them against what mattered to our portfolio rather than what mattered to them: who will work with dynamic pricing, who cares about discount value rather than commission, and who has real production in LATAM and the Caribbean.

The leverage play. The sharpest piece was Booking.com. We opted branded hotels into the Genius program where the brand allowed it, and we spent that production across the whole account — better positioning, better commission, and advertising dollars we could put behind the hotels that needed them.

Around the same time, Hopper was trying to get out from under its supply relationship with Expedia, got cut off, and came to us directly for inventory. We were at that table while it was happening. I include it because distribution partners are not fixed infrastructure. The supply chain rewires itself, sometimes very quickly, and when you are running a portfolio that size you have to decide in the moment which of those changes to back and which to sit out. Being close enough to the partners to see it coming is most of what makes that call possible.