Let’s start with the good news: British Columbia is a seller’s market.  In 2025, BC hotels ran at 70.4% per cent occupancy with a $257 average daily rate and RevPAR of nearly $181, according to STR data published by CoStar.  Vancouver hotels did even better: 78.4% occupancy and a $284 ADR.  When demand is this strong, every dollar of rate you can hold, and every guest you can win back next year, drops almost straight to the bottom line.  That’s exactly why your biggest revenue threat isn’t the competition, OTAs, or rising costs; it’s the widening gap between ownership and operations.

I’ve spent a lot of years around hotels, and I’ll tell you plainly: misalignment between the boardroom and the front desk is a revenue leak, and most properties never put it on a report.

Here’s how the leak starts.  Owners are focused on quarterly performance, asset value, and cost control.  That’s their job. Operations teams are focused on guest satisfaction, employee engagement, and service consistency.  That’s their job, too.  Neither side is wrong.  But when the two sides are measured by different definitions of success, revenue gets caught in the middle, because revenue is the one number both sides think the other is protecting.

I’ve watched the sequence more times than I’d like to admit.  A budget gets trimmed to flatter the short-term numbers, and six months later the bill shows up on the sales side.  Deferred maintenance becomes negative reviews, and reviews are your hardest-working salesperson: when the score slides, conversion drops and rate resistance climbs, so you end up discounting your way back to the occupancy you used to get at full rate.  Understaffing becomes burnout, burnout becomes turnover, and suddenly the people who upsell suites, convert enquiries, and turn a one-night stay into an annual tradition are gone.

In BC, cutting staff is cutting sales capacity, full stop.  Hotels have leaned on international workers for years, and the federal immigration and Temporary Foreign Worker changes introduced in late 2025 place, as go2HR puts it, “greater emphasis on compliance, fair wages, and proof of domestic recruitment efforts,” changes that “may initially slow hiring for many operators.”  The BC Hotel Association has been supporting employers on this file, most recently developing a workforce attraction strategy, and in previous years striking formal agreements with Barbados, Mexico, and El Salvador to connect BC employers with skilled hospitality workers.  Think about who actually generates your revenue: the front desk agent who sells the upgrade, the banquet team that wins the group rebooking, the server who turns a good dinner into a return stay.  Lose them and you’re not saving money.  You’re forfeiting sales.

Now, the cost pressure is real, and I’m not pretending otherwise.  CBRE Hotels’ 2026 industry outlook laid out updated forecasts for BC and its major markets, and Western Investor recently described BC’s hotel sector as demonstrating “collective resilience despite headwinds.”  But here’s the thing every ownership group should sit with, is that you cannot cost-cut your way to RevPAR growth.  The red pen protects this quarter’s margin.  Only the guest experience protects next year’s rate.  Because guests don’t know who owns the hotel, and they don’t care who manages it.  The family paying Vancouver’s rates, or peak-season pricing in Victoria, Kelowna, or Prince George, is buying a promise at a premium. Deliver it, and they book direct next time, at rate, and bring friends.  Break it, and you’ll pay OTA commissions and discounts to replace them, which is the most expensive customer acquisition program in our industry.

When ownership and operations are aligned, the revenue story gets almost boring, in the best way.  Employees stay, service holds, review scores hold, rate holds and repeat and direct business compound year over year.  When they’re not aligned, you’re renting your occupancy for one discounted booking at a time.  The fix isn’t complicated, but it takes intent. Put owners and operators in front of one scorecard, where review scores, repeat-guest rates, and employee engagement sit right beside GOP and debt service, because they’re leading indicators of the same revenue.  Treat CAPEX as a sales investment with a payback, not a concession.   Build trust deliberately: between ownership and operations, between leadership and the floor, and between the brand and the guest.

The demand is here, right now, waiting to be sold.  This March, Vancouver hotels posted occupancy up by 7.5% to 77.1%.  RevPAR was up 15.5% to nearly $179, according to CoStar data reported by Hotel Management.  The properties still winning that business in 2030 won’t be the ones that squeezed the most out of 2026. They’ll be the ones where the owner and the GM sell the same promise.  Short-term thinking pads a quarter. Long-term thinking compounds revenue and builds a legacy worth the rate you’re charging.