Brand Differentiation and Storytelling for Independent Hotels With Brent Shiratori

How Chemical Cost Savings Fund Revenue Technology Investments With Sue Graves

Susan (Sue) Graves is the Founder and CEO of Experience Alive, a hospitality technology consultancy that helps hotels, restaurants, and convention centers implement sustainable tech solutions to optimize operations and guest experiences. Under her leadership, the company has achieved measurable outcomes, including a 30% increase in sales revenue and a $140 million renovation for a major convention center. Before founding Experience Alive, Sue held executive roles at Marriott International and directed operational enhancements at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. She is recognized for innovative problem-solving during crises and her practical expertise at every tier of the hospitality industry. In this episode… Small operational savings can do more than protect a hotel's margins. When the right costs come down, they can create room for smarter investments in technology, guest experience, and revenue growth, but where should hoteliers start? For Sue Graves, the key lies in finding savings that can fund the next layer of improvement. She explains that something as simple as switching to ozonated water can cut chemical costs by 30-40%, reduce slip-and-fall risk, and free up labor that is often wasted on repetitive cleaning routines. Those savings can then be redirected into tools such as AI-powered phone support, direct booking technology, and other solutions that enhance service while protecting profitability. In this episode of The Lights On Podcast, Kin Sio is joined by Sue Graves, Founder and CEO of Experience Alive, to discuss how chemical cost savings can fund revenue technology investments. They discuss reducing operating costs, utilizing AI to recover missed calls, enhancing direct bookings, and creating a flywheel for improved margins. Sue also shares advice on vetting hotel tech vendors.

Hotel Growth Stories Beyond Numbers With Rodger Wada

Rodger Wada is the Senior Regional Director of Revenue Management at Springboard Hospitality, a leading third-party hotel management company that specializes in driving revenue and operational success for independent and branded hotels across the US. With nearly two decades of experience in hospitality, he has built a strong reputation in the Hawaii market, leading revenue strategy across prominent Waikiki properties. Rodger has held leadership roles with companies such as Highgate, Kokua Hospitality, and Outrigger Resorts, working across both branded and independent assets. His expertise spans pricing, distribution, and commercial strategy, with a focus on aligning revenue decisions with operations to drive sustainable performance. In this episode… What separates a hotel revenue manager who runs the numbers from one who actually moves the bottom line? For Rodger Wada, the answer comes back to the same place every time: operations. Rodger Wada is Senior Regional Director of Revenue Management at Springboard Hospitality [https://www.springboardhospitality.com/], a third-party hotel management company that runs independent and lifestyle properties across the US. He started as a concierge at Sheraton in Waikiki, moved through front desk and guest service at Outrigger, and got pulled into revenue management almost by accident when his assistant general manager noticed his civil-engineering background and said, "You must be good at math." Today he leads commercial strategy across some of Waikiki's most prominent hotels, and that operations background still shapes how he reads a P&L. In this episode of The Lights On Podcast, Kin Sio talks with Rodger about the practical side of hotel revenue management: how to rebuild ADR after a renovation without breaking rate integrity, why guest service scores (not occupancy) should trigger your next rate push, and where GDS costs hide inside branded P&Ls. They walk through the three-step playbook Rodger uses when he steps into an underperforming hotel, dig into why "every channel has a cost, including direct," and make the case that finance needs a seat at the commercial table alongside revenue, marketing, and sales.

Hidden Economics of Hotel Growth in the OTA Era With Dan Wacksman

Dan Wacksman is the Founder and CEO of Sassato LLC and Hawaii Hotel Hui, where he leverages decades of expertise to help hotel clients make strategic decisions and execute on marketing, distribution, and technology projects. Under his leadership, Hawaii Hotel Hui has grown into a key industry platform, reaching over 4,000 hospitality professionals across the Hawaiian Islands. With over 20 years of global experience spanning the US and Asia, Dan is recognized for his in-depth knowledge of hotel commercial strategy, tech stacks, and fostering local industry communities. In this episode… Most hotels lose margin in the same places: OTA rate discipline, tech stack bloat, misaligned KPIs, and weak direct booking conversion. Dan Wacksman has worked both sides — 20 years in travel distribution, then 12 as SVP of Marketing and Distribution at Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, and now running Sassato LLC out of Honolulu. Kin Sio sits down with Dan on The Lights On Podcast to break down what independent hotels consistently get wrong — and what it takes to fix it. Dan's OTA position is direct: the relationship works when managed with rate discipline. His rule — never give an OTA a better rate than your direct channels — sounds obvious, but he still walks into properties that violate it. The fix starts at the front desk. When an OTA guest checks in, that's the moment to collect contact information, build a direct relationship, and make sure the next booking doesn't go back through Expedia or Booking.com. As Dan puts it: "I am happy to get OTA bookings as long as the second time they book me, it's direct." The ROAS trap catches a lot of hotel marketing teams. A campaign with 20-to-1 return on ad spend looks like the obvious winner — until you realize it's brand search, capturing demand that already exists. The 5-to-1 campaign might be more valuable: a net-new customer who wasn't in your consideration set until you bought that ad. Incremental reach, not recapture. On the tech side, Dan has audited dozens of commercial tech stacks and has never left without finding enough savings to cover his fees — unused contracts, overlapping tools, and auto-renewing agreements with 90-day notice windows that operators didn't know were rolling into three-year terms. Hawaii Hotel Hui started as a lead gen experiment. Dan expected 300 subscribers — a way to stay visible to his consulting network. Within months it had grown to a few thousand. It now reaches over 4,000 hospitality professionals across the islands, with vendors actively competing for sponsorship spots. He closes with a candid take on Hawaii's market: 79% occupancy and $322 ADR would make most mainland operators envious, but RevPAR growth is roughly 2.5% while costs keep rising faster. Direct revenue and cost control are where independent operators need to focus over the next two years.

The Evolution and Resilience Required in Hospitality Management With Geoff Graf

Geoff Graf is the Vice President of Business Development at Hogan Hospitality Group, a hotel management company that operates and develops hospitality assets for property owners. He leads efforts to identify opportunities and build strategic partnerships to support portfolio growth. With decades of experience, he has held leadership roles across operations, asset management, and business development. His career includes working with major hotel groups and driving expansion through acquisitions, development, and long-term owner relationships. In this episode… Geoff Graf is VP of Business Development at Hogan Hospitality Group, a family-owned hotel management company with roughly 3,400 rooms across Hawaii and the US mainland. His 43-year career spans Colony Hotels, Aston, Outrigger, and Aqua — where he doubled the portfolio from 14 to 29 hotels and helped engineer the Aqua-Aston merger, which created the largest hotel management company in Hawaii at the time. Kin Sio sits down with Geoff on The Lights On Podcast to dig into what separates companies that grow to be acquired from those built to stay. Geoff's path wasn't linear. He started as a houseman in 1983 at a 60-room boutique at the foot of Diamond Head — recruited off the rugby pitch by his coach, who happened to manage the property. At 30, he left the industry for three years to compete internationally in outrigger canoe and surf ski racing, placing in the world rankings. When he came back, Colony Hotels sent him to Molokai to manage Kaluakoi Resort and Golf Club: a former Sheraton with a golf course, struggling occupancy, ownership under financial strain, limited air lift to the island, and buildings with TVs and phones stripped out. His answer was the "Pakeli" package — pakeli means "escape" in Hawaiian — which marketed those bare rooms as a deliberate unplugged experience, borrowing from Kona Village's model. It filled rooms, drove restaurant revenue, and worked. He notes it predated the unplugged travel trend by about 30 years. The conversation sharpens when Geoff draws the line between Aqua's growth strategy — explicitly designed for acquisition, which is exactly what happened when Aston's parent company absorbed them — and Hogan's: long-term owner relationships, no management agreements structured around an exit date, a deliberate consolidation from five states down to California and Arizona when remote properties were pulling more resources than they returned. For small independent operators who aren't ready for a full management agreement, Geoff's advice is direct: outsource revenue management and digital marketing first, get hospitality-specific accounting in place now if you ever plan to sell, and stop relying exclusively on OTAs — most small operators take that route, Geoff says, and it cuts directly into their margins. The right management partner, he says, pays for itself 99.5% of the time — and means you stop getting the 1 AM call.

Why Growth Marketing Matters More Than Ever for Hotels With Emanuel Moura

Emanuel Moura is the Director of Growth at Lights On, where he leads a holistic approach to hotel marketing that blends paid acquisition, lifecycle email, organic traffic, and data infrastructure into one connected system. Based in Honolulu, he built his career in growth out of college at a Bay Area drone startup before moving into hospitality, and now works across independent and boutique hotels from Hawaii to the mainland. He's an operator-minded marketer who treats growth as a compounding cross-functional effort tied directly to revenue. In this episode… Hotel growth in 2026 doesn't come from one channel. It comes from building a connected system where paid ads, organic traffic, lifecycle email, and clean data all feed each other — and then keeping that system aligned with revenue management as the market shifts. That's the case Emanuel Moura, Director of Growth at Lights On, makes in this episode when Chad Franzen of Rise25 flips the script and interviews him. Emanuel walks through how he thinks about growth across a hotel's full digital footprint: Google and Meta for reach, email automations for returning guests, organic search as properties mature, and a data stack (Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, plus booking-engine integrations with platforms like SynXis and Skipper) that lets the team see what's actually working. He explains why the current down market is separating buttoned-up properties from ones that coasted on OTA distribution, and why luxury is the one segment still gaining share. He also gets practical about AI. Claude is his daily tool — not to automate away strategy, but to compress the time between data and decision. And for hotels just starting to build direct bookings, he gives a clear sequence: understand your property story first, start with Google and Meta plus a returning-guest email program, stand up the data infrastructure, tie marketing to revenue, and expect compounding — not instant — results. By month three you'll see traction; by month six the volume steps up; by year one, year-over-year growth is meaningful.