How Hospitality America elevates guest experience through culture and data ownership
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In this week’s episode of Hotel Moment, Ben Campbell, President and CEO of Hospitality America, joins Revinate CMO Karen Stephens with a refresher in investing where it matters — your people, your technology, and the guest experience.
With siloed data being every hotelier’s enemy, Ben explains why technology that allows you to control and centralize your data is your superpower. Ben also shares why choosing the right technology helps your hotel’s decision-makers execute faster, smarter, and more informed decisions for your business.
You’ll also hear Ben’s heartfelt first account of his experience with Hurricane Helene and how he and the staff at Hospitality America rallied together to keep the guest experience bright in a dark time. It’s a reminder for every hotel leader to put your people at the center of your hotel culture.
Tune in and find out if your hotel is investing where it counts to elevate the guest experience.
Meet your host
As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.
Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.
Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com
Watch the video
Transcript
[00:00:00] Ben Campbell: How are we making quicker decisions where it matters, which is in the General Manager’s seat and the Director of Sales seats? At the end of the day, they are the business leaders of our hotels. They’re driving that success and sometimes not success at the properties. So what are we doing to help them make decisions quicker?
[00:00:23] Intro: Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.
[00:00:53] Karen Stephens: Hello, and welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast. I’m your host, Karen Stevens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate. And today, we are excited to speak with Ben Campbell, the president and CEO of Hospitality America. With over a decade of experience in the hospitality industry, Ben has built an impressive career, holding leadership positions in operations, sales, and strategy. He’s played an instrumental role in shaping Hospitality America’s value driven approach, which focuses on operational excellence and the growth of its people. Under his leadership, Hospitality America has been able to create an environment of collaboration, adaptability, and humility that drive success. Let’s dive into his journey, leadership philosophy, and insights into the evolving hospitality landscape. Hi, Ben. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:41] Ben Campbell: Thanks so much for having me, Karen.
[00:01:42] Karen Stephens: You know what? It’s a pleasure to have you here. It’s interesting. We were chatting a little bit before we started recording, so we have a lot of juicy topics to get into. But before we do that, I would love for you to take us back to the beginning. So can you remember your first day in hospitality?
[00:01:58] Ben Campbell: Definitely. I graduated college in 02/2009. I was an athlete at a small division one school. So that was my life growing up with sports. And growing up in the South, I grew up in a very hospitable family, and I was like, okay. Now what am I gonna do when I graduate in 2009 and we’re in the great recession? And I remember just a position I had through college was at the Carolina Panthers Stadium. And I remember that experience of being able to provide experiences to others and what that was like in being like this only happened once a week. We were having a game and the impact of fans coming to see the Carolina Panthers play and how I had a big part in that, it was just life changing. It was like, yes, I think this is the direction I want to go. I’m passionate about making others’ experiences as great as I feel about when I go to experience hospitality or sporting events or anything like that.
[00:02:55] Karen Stephens: Wow. That’s great. So it’s bringing that guest experience whether it’s in the stadium or whatever, helping people enjoy their leisure time. I think, basically, the gore of it, which is really cool. So and since you’ve been in hospitality, you’ve worn a lot of hats. So you’ve done some revenue management, general management, and now you’re the president and CEO of Hospitality America. So can you talk a little bit about how your early experiences shaped your kinda trajectory now as the leader of a management company like Hospitality America?
[00:03:24] Ben Campbell: Yeah. I mean, even dating back to the first time when I got that first job at the Carolina Panthers Stadium, my parents instilled in me two core principles. That is leave it better than you found it, no matter if you’re staying at a short term rental somewhere. I remember going to the beach or thinking, like, man, we’re cleaning this house more than we’re cleaning our house. And leave it better than you found it and treat it like it’s yours. And so when I take those principles into my positions, even at a young age at the Panthers Stadium, I was always questioning, okay, why are we doing it this way? Can it be done better? Is there a better way to reduce our spoilage? Is there a better way to enhance our guest experience? And so I think just always having that thought process around that and the focus of how can we make the operation better, but also how can we make the guest experience better. I’ve taken that no matter if it’s been in those positions as concessions manager to revenue management. I mean, gosh, I started in hotels as a night auditor. I went from concession side of things and came over to the hotel and started as night auditor and really kinda had to bring that whole approach full circle. And then every time I’ve grown into a new position, no matter if I’ve gotten the right training or not the right training, I’ve always said, okay. How can I leave my mark on this position and how can I make it better?
[00:04:40] Karen Stephens: So let’s talk a little bit about Hospitality America. So can we just talk about what is your portfolio look like? How many hotels? Just a little bit about the company itself. And then I’d love to talk about your core values. So we’ll come on to that second. But what’s the overall of the company itself?
[00:04:56] Ben Campbell: Yeah. So we were founded in 1995. Our founder, Chris Kargan, had two owners that wanted to open Hampton Inn’s in 1995. Back then, it was with Promise, the original owners and founders of Hampton Inn. And they opened those two hotels within a month apart of each other. And both those owners have continued to grow out their portfolio. And throughout that time, we’ve added new owners and clients. But today, we operate 20 hotels for owners and franchisees. That’s all East Of The Mississippi, and that equates to about a $150,000,000 of top line revenue that we’re responsible for. And then we’re also responsible to and for 900 employees. And so in my role as president and CEO of Hospitality America, I say all the time that I have two bosses or two people that I’m responsible for. I’m responsible to our owners who hire us and say that for us to mitigate risk and to provide the bottom line results that they expect. And then I have the employees that I’m responsible to and responsible for. And so without the employees and without us continuing to invest in them, then we can’t provide the service to our clients, our owners either. So and then that’s kinda where our core values in PEACH comes in.
[00:06:11] Karen Stephens: Yeah. So PEACH. So each letter stands for something, and you already mentioned one of them, spoiler alert. P is for passion. Is that right?
[00:06:18] Ben Campbell: That’s right.
[00:06:19] Karen Stephens: Okay. So can you take us through what does peach stand for all the letters and how that really manifests as a core value for the company?
[00:06:25] Ben Campbell: I started with Hospitality America eleven years ago as a director of sales. And so I’ve been able to see our company grow and evolve and things that we’ve done well in the past, things that we haven’t historically done well in the past. And so when I was given the opportunity to be COO at about 2022, the one thing that we didn’t quite have at the time was a definition of who we are as a company. Right? Our founders have left such a great impact on us. Our culture was set in stone, but we hadn’t defined that. So as we were continuing to grow, the big question I had was, okay. How are we assessing the new people that come into our organization? How do they assess us? How do they know what they’re getting in Hospitality America? And so that was one of the first things we did was we defined who we are, which is we are passionate with the spirit to serve. We’re committed to excellence that inspires results. We adjust, adapt, and overcome. We’re stewards of communities inside of our hotel and outside of our hotels, and then we’re humble, trustworthy, and transparent. So that’s the expectation that our employees can have of me as the president and CEO, and that’s the expectation I have of them in our culture.
[00:07:31] Karen Stephens: So those are fantastic core values. Now I think a lot of people can hear stuff like that. They think, oh, that’s really nice. That really resonates. But our conversation before we started recording, I think, is where we see core values like that, where the feet hit the street, so to speak. So before we hit the record button, we were talking a little bit. You’re from Greenville, South Carolina. And I had mentioned that last year, I was planning to do a girls’ trip. Every year, I go with my girls. From high school, we leave our families and we go do a fun trip. So our plan was to go to Asheville. It was to go to Asheville, North Carolina, which we were flying into Greenville, and we were gonna drive down. And, of course, they had terrible flooding all through hurricane and terrible flooding throughout that region. So can we pick up the story from there? Because you actually have two hotels that are in Asheville. And I would love for you to talk a bit about your disaster response and how those hotels where they are today.
[00:08:23] Ben Campbell: There’s so many stories I could tell. I mean, heartbreaking stories and then just uplifting motivating stories, and so I’ll try to focus on the latter. When it happened we have four hotels in South Florida, and that owner down there has been a thirty year relationship for us. So we’re very accustomed to dealing with hurricanes and what that process looks like when the forecast says, hey. A hurricane’s coming to South Florida. But a hurricane hitting the mountains of North Carolina, no one expected that. I mean, for us, we’re like, yeah, we’re three hours, four hours inland. Like, we don’t expect to necessarily add that. And we had the necessary things like water and just, you know, you may lose power for a couple hours, something like that. But this storm was devastating. I mean, two feet of water, rain in twenty four hours, it was unbelievable. And the amount of mudslides that were in the area so, anyways, we had two hotels. One of them lost power for about a week, then the other one, same. And then the one hotel lost it for about a week, also lost water for about three weeks. And so it’s not just the water that we need to consume, it’s also flushing the toilets. It’s also doing the linen. How do you stay sanitary without running water inside of a building? And so we did everything possible to be able to stay with some type of capacity of occupancy. And the amount of FEMA that came in, the amount of services that came in, but there was nowhere for them to stay. We weren’t the only hotel without water. I mean, pretty much every hotel in Asheville didn’t have water because of the dam system had broken and the amount of sediment that had gotten into the reservoirs. They basically just shut down the filtration system so that they didn’t damage it by sending all that silt and sand and dirt all through it. So everybody was in the same situation. So we just boots I mean, everything we could do. Greenville was we’re an hour down the mountain from Asheville. We were still trying to recover because we had lost some power for about a week. But quickly our teams just trying to get in contact with our GMs. I remember we finally got in contact with one of the GMs, and she was literally, like, hanging out of a window on the Top Floor with her hand out the window, like, with the cell phone trying to get service because service was so bad. And just the amount of ownership, I mean, you know, just in two core values, the passion that our employees had for our guests and for their hotel and for what we do, but also just the community that they were building by saying to the guests that were there and the surrounding community of, like, hey. We are shelter. We are here for you. I mean, just the stress that that brings, and it was unbelievable to hear the stories. And so, I mean, even me, I remember I rented a box truck because I’m here in Greenville. I rented a box truck, drove up to that hotel, got all their linen, drove it down to our Embassy Suites here in Greenville. The staff stayed late, did the laundry of the embassy hotel, then stayed late and did all the laundry for the hotel that didn’t have water. And then when they were finished, we put it back in the box truck, I drove it back up there. I mean, whatever we could do because we didn’t wanna turn away you know, obviously, there’s business on one hand, but on the other hand, I mean, we’re a shelter. People needed to be in a safe place because their homes had literally been washed away from off the mountainside or were flooded and is devastating.
[00:11:50] Karen Stephens: Absolutely. It’s just incredible to me. I think now more than ever, we seem to have like, we always know, okay, hurricanes we know when hurricane season is. We know that South Florida’s at risk. Like you said, seeing these events where we’re not expecting that in the mountains of North Carolina. So what’s your advice to other management companies, hotel GMs? Like, how do you start to think about preparing your teams so that when something like this strikes I mean, first of all, kudos to your team to band together under all of that stress and pull it through. But how much preparation should you be thinking about on the front end, and how do you approach that as a management company?
[00:12:27] Ben Campbell: For the management companies and for the owners to prepare, I think you can never take anything for granted. Anything that comes into the area, I’d rather be more prepared than underprepared. Always have the emergency binders fully up to date. That’s something that we are constantly doing on a year-to-year basis. And then just the crisis binders that we put together for the hotels. But GM, it’s a lot to expect them to take over an entire building like that, especially when you don’t have power and you can’t communicate and you’re just literally on an island and can’t communicate out. I think it comes down to how what kind of support that you can give them in the emergency binders, just the documentation, anything from step- by-step to make sure that you’re covered on that basis.
[00:13:08] Karen Stephens: Yeah. So we’re gonna pivot here in a minute and talk about technology, but I wanna put a finer point on when you’re talking about emergency preparedness, you need paper binders. Like, it’d be cool to have you. Maybe you got some walkie talkies. Maybe you got some Internet access. Maybe you don’t. So
[00:13:24] Ben Campbell: Yep. I mean, I was just talking with our brand reps with Hilton and Marriott recently. I mean, that’s something that the brands are thinking of. I mean, I remember I went to a hurricane as a General Manager in South Florida, and we went fourteen days without Internet. And so I went fourteen days without a property management system. I mean, it was scary because you have to get your arms around who’s in your building and how do you run a hotel. I mean, we were running a hotel off of a spreadsheet that I created with a room matrix. But now with cellular device that sometimes with the national disasters, it can knock that out. But the brands now are trying to think of that. How can we run our property management systems off of a cellular device? Can we plug in a cellular device into our network and then boost that out so that we’re not losing the ability to run a hotel because we don’t have Internet.
[00:14:15] Karen Stephens: Absolutely. So it’s good that I think we all have to be thinking at this stage. How do you stay one step ahead of the curve? And certainly so that’s not only for anything that has to do with crazy weather patterns, but also the quickly evolving technology landscape. So, I mean, the clip that we are seeing now is pretty crazy. So it’s an essential part of modern hospitality for sure. So how is hospitality America investing in technology to support your operations, and what tools are you focusing on to ensure that your teams have the information they need to perform their jobs?
[00:14:48] Ben Campbell: Yeah. I mean, I’m lucky that we have a healthy business, and we’re able to invest in that and that we have great owners who believe in the direction that we’re headed and understand that technology plays a critical piece in that. For a company of our size, we don’t have the unlimited budgets like a lot of the big operators have, but whatever we can, we are siphoning that way. And it’s been a year by year process. So over the past three years, we’ve invested more in our accounting back of house, back end services that give us a lot more scalability. One of the things that’s coming for our industry specifically is a continuous accounting. And so I don’t know if you’ve heard that, but it is it plays into revenue drastically because if we can’t balance our revenues and understand where our revenues are balancing, then how can we forecast appropriately? And so if we’re not accruing and actualizing and closing our accounting books on quicker, then it lags our forecasting process behind. And so one of the things that we invested in was a good accounting core system that gives us the ability to enhance the AI abilities because they are investing in that, obviously, and as a software company. And then for us, it’s, okay, now how are we gonna be able to do continuous accounting so that we’re not having to close our books ten days, fifteen days after the prior month? We know exactly where we are as soon as the day closes. So that side of the accounting, and then obviously on the revenue side. Once you have that foundational set from the accounting, then it becomes, okay, how are we making quicker decisions where it matters, which is in the General Manager seat and the Directors of Sales seats. At the end of the day, they are the business leaders of our hotels. They’re driving that success and sometimes not success at the properties. So what are we doing to help them make decisions quicker? And so that’s coming in the forms of what we’re doing is we are partnering with vendors and pulling that data in for ourselves. We’re trying to control as much of that data as we can. We only operate branded hotels, Hilton and Marriott. They’re great partners, but they hoard their own data too that we don’t get a lot of. They’re starting to become a little bit more open with that data. And so today, Hospitality America, we have a direct feed connection with Hilton and Marriott and then what we’re doing with that data. So we’re hoping eventually to be able to put AI on top of that data so that our decision makers on boots on the ground can literally interact with that data like you do with ChattGPT, but it’s within our own organization. So there’s a lot that’s coming with that. We’re not there yet, but all of our tech investments is along how do we make decisions quicker to allow our General Managers and Directors of Sales to one, make the decision quicker, and two, have a better impact on our guests and consumers.
[00:17:41] Karen Stephens: Interesting. So the kind of data that you’re looking at, is it revenue data or is it guest preferences or is it guest profiles? Like, what is the focus?
[00:17:49] Ben Campbell: Yeah. Great question. So that’s the point of bringing it all in house because we have a number of platforms if it’s our labor and efficiency platform and our forward looking pace data compared to our comp sets. We wanna be able to understand how that interacts. And so if we’re able to take one hotel in benchmarking and say, okay, you’re an airport hotel, and we’re able to run this labor coefficient. Now how do we apply that in other markets? Where can we eke out some differences of knowing that this specific piece of business, airport business, actually cost us x? And so we get a true CPOR, cost per occupied room, down to the business segment level. That’s the ultimate secret to success. Then you know how to bid on a piece of business and saying, okay. I know that when I get this business, what my profitability ultimately is gonna be. And so we’re unable to do that today because all of our data lives in all these different platforms. We gotta be able to get it in house so that then we can start running those regression models ourselves and doing that testing, if you will.
[00:18:55] Karen Stephens: 100%. I mean, you hit it on the head. I think this is a classic problem for hospitality is siloed data. It is everywhere. And whether that’s you trying to understand what your guest profile really looks like or where I love what you’re talking about, which is really applying the revenue lens and your costs and going after a specific piece of business. I mean, I don’t know if our CFO listens to this podcast, but if he does, Gary, this is for you. Closing your books in less than ten days and getting an actual margin. I mean, it’s kind of the dream state, right, to be able to go to an owner and be like, this is exactly how profitable we are based on all these factors. It’s really cool. So when you’re bringing all that in house, do you have a system that you’re using? Is it built on your own, or how are you can I just if you don’t mind, Sharon, how are you doing that?
[00:19:42] Ben Campbell: We’re kinda following the suit of the big major brands too. I mean, they obviously have much bigger budgets than we do. But, I mean, what we’re understanding a couple years ago, we went down this path and said, okay. What does this look like? And how could we accomplish it? Do we have to do it ourselves, or can we lay this on something else? And at this time, we didn’t quite know what was coming with AI in terms of chat, GPT, and Copilot. But quickly in that assessment, we realized Microsoft is gonna be the best platform. So we actually just transitioned away from our current provider back to Microsoft. And so we built everything off of SharePoint, everything off of Teams, knowing that eventually we were gonna be able to put Copilot AI on top of that. And you can’t do that just point blank because there’s a number of security risks that we have to make sure that we fence off and understand. So we’re being very methodical and very careful in how we do that. But the other day, I mean, we have all of our star reports go into our teams. And so I went in my Copilot license and said, give me a recap of all of our RevPar indexes across the company, and bam. Like, add them all. Like, in a graph. I mean, it was just fascinating stuff. So and it’s only gonna continue to get better and better, so we’ve done that. So we’re pulling all of that into a data lake today. I’m not saying that we’ve accomplished everything that we want to or that we’re able to fully understand it, but we are pulling that data in today. And then now it’s about, like, okay. How do we build the foundation to make sure that this business intelligence department is set up for success?
[00:21:16] Karen Stephens: That’s right. Yeah. That’s really interesting. Our CEO likes to say AI doesn’t do data silos, which is true. So it only works if it’s in one place. It doesn’t know to go look. You have to consolidate it. And, you know, obviously, this isn’t a plug for revenue, but what we have worked on is being able to ingest all of the guest data from ancillary revenue sources in addition to PMS. So if you just look at the guest side of the equation, plus, obviously, the spend and all of that, we put all of that into a central location. And, of course, that only becomes valuable if it can then be sent out because we know that our customers have their own data lakes that have more than just that. You have the accounting details. You have labor. You have all of those things. But I think the future is any vendor, whether they’re Revinate or somebody else, whatever data you have has to be able to be packaged up and sent out and matched up in another system if it’s gonna be effective.
[00:22:09] Ben Campbell: Exactly. Yeah. We are going through those painstaking things today because the data that we’re getting is raw and having to siphon through that based upon whatever platform is sending to us. I mean, I’m talking like I know what I’m talking about. Just this is the feedback I get when we have the meetings from the BI side, and I’ve seen some of it.
[00:22:28] Karen Stephens: Entity resolution is really hard. We hired a guy from Equifax. He’s our chief data officer, but his whole goal is to make sure we can match it up, scrub it, clean it, and so it is not an easy problem. But it’s an interesting one. And if you solve it, you got the keys to the kingdom, basically.
[00:22:46] Ben Campbell: Totally. And for a company of our size, like I said, I mean, you know, we’re 20 hotels. We don’t have hundreds, and so our budgets are only so large. And so we have a small team that works really hard, and then we try to use the resources we have to accomplish or to solve solutions that we can.
[00:23:04] Karen Stephens: I love it. Well, I’m gonna say it. Thank goodness for the geeks.
[00:23:08] Ben Campbell: Yeah. I only know enough to be dangerous, and then I get to a level where I’m like, okay. I tap out. I can’t keep going. That’s right. Me too.
[00:23:16] Karen Stephens: That’s why we’re on the go to market side of the house. So are that you know? The sales marketing revenue, that’s what we do over here, which is great. So last question for you. Looking ahead, what’s next for Hospitality America? Are there any exciting plans or innovations or stuff coming up within your future besides everything we just talked about?
[00:23:33] Ben Campbell: So we talked about one, growth. I mean, you know, as we look ahead into the markets, I mean, we haven’t talked too much about our consumers yet, but the consumer sentiment is absolutely changing. Coming out of COVID, inflation has changed a lot of their value perspective, if you will, what they’re paying for versus what they’re getting. And in our industry, we have a lot of our guests or the intent to recommend or the guest surveys that we’re getting continue to be harder and harder to achieve higher and higher results because our ADRs, as they have to to keep up with inflation of cost, continue to rise. That doesn’t mean that our guests are happy always to pay those for products that have been neglected coming through COVID. And so luckily for us, we have owners that continue to invest in their assets. That’s what we look for in partners because this is the recipe for success for us. Like I said, I mean, we’re a small team and a company that’s growing, but I wanna grow in a very scalable way. And so when I look out ahead into the future, the consumers are telling us they want unique experiences. They’re willing to pay up when they feel the value is in return. And that value is in return when it comes to great spaces that they feel warm, inviting, and just vibrant. And they feel the vibrancy from other guests that are in the lobbies or at the bars, at the restaurants. The experience is huge, obviously, but, obviously, just the experience level that they have from our staff as well. So for us in Hospitality America, we are opening just about two hotels with our partners a year for the next three years. So that is a good sustainable way for us to grow, but we’re also looking to capitalize on the branded boutique side of our business. So in the more the tapestries, the tributes of the world within Hilton and Marriott. So we just opened our first tapestry. We’ll open another one next year and another one following that, And we feel really good about where that trajectory of our industry is headed.
[00:25:35] Karen Stephens: Well, Ben, it’s been a real pleasure. Let’s give a shout out to Asheville. Asheville’s open for business. Please go support that community and the hotels.
[00:25:43] Ben Campbell: Yeah. Asheville is beautiful part of the country, so is Greenville. You can come on down to Greenville too. Hit both of them at the same time. But check out Hospitality America as well. We got a lot of great things coming. Follow us along on LinkedIn, and you can follow the story.
[00:25:57] Karen Stephens: Sounds great, Ben. We’ll put all of that in the show notes, and it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for being my guest.
[00:26:02] Ben Campbell: I appreciate it, Karen.
[00:26:07] Karen Stephens: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmoment podcast. Until next time, keep innovating.
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