A resilience playbook for hotel leaders
Hotel Business carried its Hot Topics session, "Planning Through Uncertainty: A Resilience Playbook for Hotel Leaders," on 30 September 2026. The publisher posted the session as a video and paired it with a text feature. Entegra partnered the session, and Glenn Haussman, founder and host of the No Vacancy Live Podcast, moderated it.
The panel was Will Loughran, chief operating officer at Concord Hospitality Enterprises; Beau Benton, president of LBA Hospitality; Eric Rubino, chief operating officer and principal at Extreme Hospitality; Daniel Block, senior vice president of operations, full service, at Hotel Equities; and Amar Doshi, vice president of supply growth and procurement at Entegra.
Productivity ahead of the labor line
Block said labor is the largest expense at a hotel. He said the common practice manages labor dollars where a productivity measure serves better. He named housekeeping, lobby attendants, the front desk and food and beverage as the teams to review. "We need to take a deep dive into productivity and make sure ... we're getting the most out of our investment in those people," he said.
Preparation, and where a cost cut reaches the guest
Benton set preparation as the first requirement. "You play as you practice, and are you doing these things in the good times and in the bad?" he said. "When you do have the shocks to the system, you're ready for it." He named organized storage rooms, equipped housekeeping carts, working vacuums and adequate linen as the items to check.
Loughran named bacon as a product where a cut reached the guest. "We've reduced, we've scaled back, we've gone down a tier in many cases," he said. "When you cut too close, or you cut too far, that is something that guests really pick up on and really experience in a powerfully negative way." His response was to evaluate what sells, reduce inventory, simplify menus and rebuild procurement and portioning discipline.
Block took the same line on food quality. "When it comes to food quality, we can't save our way to prosperity," he said. He named food waste and labor as the two places where savings exist.
Empowerment at the property
Rubino said a procurement system can stiffen as a company grows, with approved vendors and ordering lists narrowing what a property can do. "For us it's a heavy push on empowerment at the property level, to make sure our teams feel they have the ability to pivot and to control cost," he said.
Loughran drew a line between the functions a company can centralize and the decisions a general manager holds. "We want the GMs leveraging procurement resources, but also saying, 'I know what my customers want,'" he said.
AI in the administration
Block described reading three elevator contracts, each 25 to 35 pages, through the technology to pull the differences and the similarities into a short summary. He said it also reads menus and guest comments.
Doshi said Entegra runs AI across its data and digital operations, and he gave human input the deciding weight. "It's only as good as the person that's operating it, and it's only as good as the prompt and the way that you build it," he said.