How do you compare hotels fairly across a portfolio?

Mapping before dashboards

Portfolio views do not die of bad visualisation. They die of mapping — one property expensing what another capitalises, different fiscal calendars, mixed currencies, a management fee above the line here and below it there.

And they die quietly, because the number still renders. The chart still draws. The property that appears to be your worst performer is, on inspection, simply the one that classifies its repairs differently — and nobody checked, because checking was nobody’s job and the chart looked fine.

Then compare like with like

A resort ranked against an airport select-service property is not a performance comparison. Their cost structures, labour models and revenue profiles have nothing to do with each other.

Cluster by segment, scale and market before you rank anything. Otherwise the league table measures your portfolio’s composition rather than its management — and it will do so authoritatively, in a convincing font, to people making capital decisions.

And treat every outlier as a mapping question first

Most of them are. The property that suddenly looks terrible has usually changed a classification, not a performance.

Which is a discipline worth adopting deliberately, because it saves you from the most embarrassing meeting available in asset management: the one where a general manager is asked to explain a variance that turns out to be an accounting policy.

Terms

• CPOR (Cost Per Occupied Room)