Check-In with Bryan

Bryan Fish
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Business
  • Updated Weekly

Welcome to Check-In with Bryan, your essential podcast for staying ahead in the dynamic world of hospitality. Hosted by Bryan Fish, CEO of Reliance Hospitality and a highly sought-after keynote speaker, this podcast dives deep into the strategic insights, evolving trends, and transformative ideas driving the hospitality and travel industries forward.    Drawing from Bryan’s extensive background in hospitality management, strategic planning, and business innovation, each episode features compelling discussions with influential industry leaders, hotel executives, investors, asset managers, and expert consultants. You’ll gain valuable insights into operational excellence, market developments, investment opportunities, asset optimization strategies, and relevant travel news influencing the hospitality landscape.   Designed specifically for hotel owners, operators, hospitality investors, travel professionals, and industry leaders, Check-In with Bryan empowers listeners to elevate their business strategies, harness industry-leading insights, and navigate the ever-evolving intersection of hospitality and travel.    Stay informed, inspired, and ahead of the competition with Bryan Fish and Reliance Hospitality.

  1. 5d ago ·  Video

    The Forrest Gump of Real Estate

    At 27, Russ Flicker walked into Trump Tower expecting an introduction. He walked out having negotiated his own salary — in the room, on the spot, with no idea the meeting was an interview. He'll tell you he negotiated it badly. He also started two weeks later, spent five years there, and eventually inherited the office of the man who ran development. From there: the hospitality development team at Blackstone, then chief investment officer at the Ian Schrager Company. Then, in 2010 — with a 35% RevPAR decline behind the industry and two young children at home — he and two partners launched AWH Partners with no cycle to lean on and everything to prove. More than $2 billion into hotel real estate later, plus a management company of their own, he calls himself the Forrest Gump of real estate: somewhere in the corner of a lot of important photographs. This conversation goes where most investment interviews don't. He says the thing nobody says on a panel about select service. He explains why owning the management company means there's nobody left to blame. And he gives the single best piece of acquisitions advice in the season, which is essentially permission to not buy anything. IN THIS EPISODE The Trump Tower meeting he didn't know was an interview — and walking in the next week to "who the hell are you, and why did he hire you?"The dot-com venture that failed at 25, and the business partner he's now been married to for 25 yearsWhat Blackstone taught him about rigor, and what Ian Schrager taught him about starting from a white sheet of paperWhy 2010 — the worst moment in a century to raise money for hotels — turned out to be the right oneBrand proliferation: "they have undergraduate now. When is middle school coming out?"The honest answer nobody gives on stage — select service absolutely competes with full service, same brand family includedMarriott–Starwood, the most generous loyalty program ever built, and the college essay written about gaming itWhy Hyatt has the opposite problem from Hilton right nowPoints-night economics, and why dropping rate at 1pm can make you more money by midnightWhy they bought their own management company — "if there's a problem, I can't blame anyone. Ask Russ. I'm at fault."When AWH is deliberately not the right buyer, and why they won't bidTrophy assets, older supply that should come out of the market, and the proliferation of debt letting people hang on"You're not paid to acquire. You're paid to run through our process. If the process says red light, you've done your job."Why the story is what makes anyone believe the numbers — and what his sister, who works in lending, says about the decks she receivesGAME — Buy, Sell or Hold: 60 seconds, 12 prompts, no hedgingCONNECT WITH RUSS FLICKER AWH Partners → https://awhpartners.com ABOUT CHECK-IN WITH BRYAN Hosted by Bryan Fish, CEO of Reliance Hospitality — conversations with the owners, operators and creators shaping hospitality. On your side of the table. Subscribe → https://www.youtube.com/@Check-InwithBryan Check out our website for more: checkinwithbryan.com Season 6 presenting partner: Immedia. Produced by RH Media Productions. Special thanks to our sponsors: Immedia, Regency Group, Avalon Risk Management, Arcstone Insurance Advisors, and Achilles HR. #HotelInvestment #Hospitality #CommercialRealEstate #HotelRealEstate #AssetManagement #HotelBrands #PrivateEquity #HotelDevelopment #CheckInWithBryan

    The Forrest Gump of Real Estate

  2. Sep 22 ·  Video

    He Turned Down JP Morgan for a Restaurant Job

    Will Dasco got demoted the summer he was a bartender on Cape Cod. Bartender down to server — a punishment, on paper. He made more money, he was better at it, and it set the direction for the next decade. A few years later he finished an accounting degree at Suffolk and had two comparable offers in hand: JP Morgan Chase and Hillstone Restaurant Group. He took the restaurant job. His family hated it. "I got a lot of stern talking-tos" — but finance didn't feel right in his core, and hospitality did. What followed was ten years of saying yes to everything: Boston to Beverly Hills to San Francisco to Boca Raton to Orlando to Pompano Beach, where he was promoted to general manager a week after his 24th birthday. Then Miami, then Atlanta six weeks before the pandemic, then Denver. He saw more of the country in his twenties than most people see in a lifetime, one transfer at a time. And then, just before 30, he hit the question that ends a lot of good runs: is this it? IN THIS EPISODE The demotion that changed his trajectory, and why serving paid better than the bar anywayTurning down JP Morgan for Hillstone, and the conversations with family that followedWhy saying yes to every transfer is the whole game in your twenties — "if you don't say yes, they'll move on to the next person"Becoming a GM at 24 and feeling the weight of it immediatelyMoving to Atlanta six weeks before the pandemic, and what that kind of isolation does to youThe manager who gifted him a snowboard as a parting shot — and how falling down a mountain taught him to adjust in publicThe night he wrote a resignation letter, made himself a Negroni, drank it, and hit send with nothing lined up"I couldn't decide what was next until I decided that this wasn't it"Getting walked out ten days into a three-month notice, and how he thinks about that nowWhy he started Hospitality by Will, and the video about needing an hour of silence after a shift that went everywhereChasing a viral moment and catching yourself doing itWhat AI genuinely can't replace — and the moment every one of us starts shouting "agent, agent, agent" into a phone treeReader stories from the industry, including a guest locked out of their room at 3am with no clothes onCONNECT WITH WILL DASCO Instagram → https://instagram.com/hospitalitybywill ABOUT CHECK-IN WITH BRYAN Hosted by Bryan Fish, CEO of Reliance Hospitality — conversations with the owners, operators and creators shaping hospitality. On your side of the table. Subscribe → https://www.youtube.com/@Check-InwithBryan check out more at checkinwithbryan.com Special thanks to our sponsors: Immedia, Regency Group, Avalon Risk Management, Arcstone Insurance Advisors, and Achilles HR. Season 6 presenting partner: Immedia Produced by RH Media Productions. #Hospitality #FoodAndBeverage #HospitalityByWill #RestaurantIndustry #CareerChange #ContentCreator #HotelIndustry #CheckInWithBryan

    He Turned Down JP Morgan for a Restaurant Job

  3. Sep 15 ·  Video

    I’ll Build It So They Can’t Tell Me No

    Sarah Dandashy of Ask a Concierge got a flat "no" from a major brand two weeks before we taped this. Her response: build something they can't turn down. In her third visit to Check-In with Bryan, Sarah opens up about the rejections behind a career that looks effortless from the outside — the year-long TV development deal that died, the brands that passed, and the mindset that carried her through all of it: "It's not rejection, it's redirection." Sarah made her professional debut at 14 as a fairy sprite at the Georgia Renaissance Festival — eight hours a day on her feet, inventing a character and pulling strangers into a world that didn't exist. She still calls it the best hospitality training she ever got. From Jeddah to London to Atlanta to Washington D.C., she trained at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service pointed squarely at diplomacy, and landed in hospitality instead. In 2012, working the concierge desk in Beverly Hills, she started filming what-to-see-and-do videos in Los Angeles and took her advice off the desk and onto the internet — years before anyone called it a content strategy. "I was creating reels before other people were creating reels." In 2015, Les Clefs d'Or International named her Best Young Concierge in the world. She has since written the bestselling HOSPITALITY FROM WITHIN, spoken on the TEDx stage, and now spends more than 200 nights a year on the road. IN THIS CONVERSATION Why rejection is a redirect, not a verdict — and why "the rent is too expensive" to keep living in that feelingThe passage from HOSPITALITY FROM WITHIN that stopped Bryan cold: "Follow the yeses."Turning concierge tenacity on your own career — if you'd find a guest a Plan B, C and D, do it for yourselfThe year-long TV development deal that ended in a no, and what she built so it couldn't happen againWhy she turns down content ideas that would probably perform wellTelling a brand their idea will fall flat without making anyone feel stupid — and having no ego about whose idea winsContent creation as a legitimate small business, and why the "influencer" eye-roll is about a decade out of dateFilming since age seven on her grandfather's camera, including interviews with rocksThe audience she never expected to find: not tourists, locals looking for a date night ideaBryan's own first stage role, which involved an elf costume and tightsThen we close the way every episode this season closes — with a game. Tyler reads real hotel guest reviews and Sarah and Bryan guess how the guest actually rated the stay. Black mold, a cockroach in the bed... and a two out of five. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CONNECT WITH SARAH DANDASHY Ask a Concierge → https://askaconcierge.tv Instagram → https://instagram.com/askaconcierge ABOUT CHECK-IN WITH BRYAN Hosted by Bryan Fish, CEO of Reliance Hospitality — conversations with the owners, operators and creators shaping hospitality. On your side of the table. For more - check out our website at: checkinwithbryan.com Season 6 presented by Immedia. Produced by RH Media Productions. Special thanks to our supporting sponsors: Regency Group, Avalon Risk Management, Arcstone Insurance Advisors, and Achilles HR. #Hospitality #ContentCreator #AskAConcierge #Concierge #HospitalityFromWithin #GuestExperience #CheckInWithBryan

    I’ll Build It So They Can’t Tell Me No

  4. Sep 8 ·  Video

    Your Press Release Is Getting Deleted

    Hotel press releases mostly get deleted, and the reason is almost never the writing. CJ Arlotta spent his career on the other side of the desk - a journalist covering hospitality, healthcare, politics and government tech, and senior editor at Hotel Business before he opened his own B2B hospitality PR agency in 2019, about three months before the industry stopped moving. So when he tells you what happens to your announcement when it hits an editor's inbox, he's not guessing. This is the season premiere, and it's the conversation you'd normally only get after the recorder goes off. IN THIS EPISODE • From journalist to agency owner — and launching a PR firm right before COVID • Why keeping roughly 30% of the portfolio outside hospitality kept the lights on • "Everybody thinks their news is news" — how to tie an announcement to something the industry actually cares about • PR is 50/50: what owners think they're buying versus what they're signing up for • Proving ROI on a service with no physical product • Overexposure is real, and sometimes the right advice is to sit down for a month • GM appointments, recycled awards, and the case for paying for real headshots and high-res photography • Conference panels: why 80% of the work happens before you walk into the room • Crisis: an attorney AND a PR firm on retainer, prepared holding statements, and the GM whose answer became the headline • GAME — No Comment: five questions, one card, never played CHECK IN WITH BRYAN - new episodes weekly. Visit: checkinwithbryan.com for more! Produced by RH Media Productions Special thanks to our sponsors: Immedia, Regency Group, Avalon Risk Management, Arcstone Insurance Advisors, and Achilles HR. Visit: checkinwithbryan.com for more! #HospitalityPodcast #HotelIndustry #PublicRelations #HotelMarketing #CrisisCommunications #HospitalityPR #HotelBusiness #B2BMarketing #CheckInWithBryan

    Your Press Release Is Getting Deleted

  5. Jun 19

    Can a Hotel Run Without a General Manager?

    In this episode of Check-In with Bryan, Bryan sits down in person with returning guest Cody Adent, President and Chief Financial Officer of Vibrant Management, a forward-thinking hospitality management company specializing in boutique hotels, independent properties, and unique hospitality experiences. Cody shares how Vibrant Management is expanding into markets like South Lake Tahoe, why their “Virtual GM” model works so well for smaller independent hotels, and how AI, automation, guest messaging, smart locks, revenue tools, and remote operations are reshaping the way boutique properties are managed. The conversation also dives into hotel tech adoption, why hospitality is such a difficult industry for new software companies to break into, the role of AI in improving—not replacing—hotel operations, and why independent hotels need partners who understand their specific challenges. Bryan and Cody also talk about BITAC, casino hospitality, guest data, OTA challenges, conference networking, hotel reviews, barn door disasters, family travel, and the realities of building long-term relationships in the hospitality industry. In This Episode What a Virtual GM is and how it worksWhy smaller boutique hotels can benefit from remote operationsHow AI is being used in guest communication and revenue managementWhy hospitality tech companies need to play the long gameThe challenge of switching PMS, booking engines, and software systemsWhy independent hotels are often underserved by major conferencesHow Vibrant Management finds its niche with unique propertiesCody’s path into hospitality through finance and hotel ownershipWhat casino hotels can teach the rest of hospitality about dataWhy great hotel operations still come down to common sense #Hospitality #HotelManagement #BoutiqueHotels #IndependentHotels #HotelOperations #HospitalityIndustry #HotelTech #AIHospitality #RevenueManagement #HotelOwners #HotelDevelopment #VibrantManagement #CheckInWithBryan #BryanFish #HospitalityPodcast

    Can a Hotel Run Without a General Manager?

  6. Jun 9

    Why Hyatt Is Betting Big on Midscale Hotels

    In this episode of Check-In with Bryan, Bryan Fish sits down with Jason Ballard, SVP and Global Brand Leader for the Essentials Portfolio at Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Jason shares how Hyatt is expanding into new markets through brands like Hyatt Studios, Hyatt Select, Caption by Hyatt, Hyatt Place, Hyatt House, Unscripted by Hyatt, and UrCove. The conversation dives into Hyatt’s approach to midscale and upper-midscale growth, owner-focused development, conversion strategy, brand discipline, guest experience, and what it takes to build hotel brands that actually work in the real world. They also discuss Jason’s 20+ year career at Hyatt, how hospitality creates long-term opportunity, why travel changes people, and the leadership lessons he has learned from working across revenue management, operations, analytics, brand development, and global hotel strategy. Topics covered: * Hyatt’s growth in the essentials and midscale hotel space * The strategy behind Hyatt Studios and Hyatt Select * Why conversion brands are becoming more important * How Hyatt thinks about owners, operators, and development costs * Building hotels around real operational feedback * The future of hotel loyalty and guest experience * What makes Hyatt’s brand approach different * Career lessons from 20+ years in hospitality * Why travel and hospitality still matter If you’re a hotel owner, developer, operator, investor, or hospitality professional, this conversation offers a deep look into where the hotel industry is heading and how one of the world’s most respected hospitality brands is thinking about growth. Subscribe for more conversations with leaders across hospitality, hotel ownership, operations, development, branding, and business strategy. #hoteldevelopment #hotelownership #hotelbrands #hospitalityleadership, #hotelconversions #midscale#hotels #HyattEssentials

    Why Hyatt Is Betting Big on Midscale Hotels

  7. May 27

    Inside the Future of Hospitality Technology

    What if the future of hospitality starts with better spaces? In this episode of Check-In with Bryan, Bryan Fish sits down with Jeff Emmons, CEO of Immedia, to talk about how NextSpace became more than a showroom — it became an immersive experience center where clients can see, touch, test, and understand technology before making major investments. Jeff breaks down how Immedia built a multi-million-dollar ecosystem around AV integration, workplace technology, smart meeting rooms, event rentals, hospitality tech, and podcast production — and why physical experience still matters in a digital world. Bryan and Jeff also dig into what hotels can learn from this model, including built-in AV, smarter meeting spaces, guestroom automation, occupancy sensors, leak detection, energy savings, ROI, and the operational value of better data. In this episode: How NextSpace became a sales and experience engineWhy clients need to experience technology before buying itHow built-in AV can improve hotel meeting spacesWhy smart guestrooms can reduce costs and improve operationsThe ROI behind occupancy sensors, leak detection, and automationHow podcast studios and content spaces are becoming business assetsWhy hospitality needs better technology infrastructureSubscribe to Check-In with Bryan for more conversations on hospitality, hotel operations, technology, leadership, travel, business, and the future of guest experience. #HospitalityTechnology #HotelTechnology #AVIntegration #SmartHotels #CheckInWithBryan

    Inside the Future of Hospitality Technology

  8. May 21

    Is Hotel Tech Losing the Human Touch?

    What happens when a longtime hotel operator moves into the world of hospitality technology? In this episode of Check-In with Bryan, Bryan Fish sits down with Nick Knight of Duetto to talk about the evolution of hotel tech, revenue management, AI, personalization, and why the future of hospitality still depends on human connection. From old-school PMS systems and wake-up call printers to cloud-based platforms, machine learning, generative AI, and profit optimization, Nick breaks down how technology is reshaping hotel operations — and where the industry still needs to be careful. They also discuss the disappearing role of the traditional concierge and maître d’, the importance of training, the rise of revenue and profit operating systems, and why hoteliers need to stay curious as the industry changes faster than ever. In this episode: How hotel technology has changed over the last 20 yearsWhy AI should support hoteliers, not replace themThe future of revenue management and profit optimizationHow Duetto is approaching AI and machine learningWhy hospitality still needs human connectionThe importance of training the next generation of hotel leadersSubscribe to Check-In with Bryan for more conversations on hospitality, hotels, travel, technology, operations, and the future of the industry. #HospitalityTechnology #HotelIndustry #RevenueManagement #HospitalityPodcast #HotelTech

    Is Hotel Tech Losing the Human Touch?
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

Welcome to Check-In with Bryan, your essential podcast for staying ahead in the dynamic world of hospitality. Hosted by Bryan Fish, CEO of Reliance Hospitality and a highly sought-after keynote speaker, this podcast dives deep into the strategic insights, evolving trends, and transformative ideas driving the hospitality and travel industries forward.    Drawing from Bryan’s extensive background in hospitality management, strategic planning, and business innovation, each episode features compelling discussions with influential industry leaders, hotel executives, investors, asset managers, and expert consultants. You’ll gain valuable insights into operational excellence, market developments, investment opportunities, asset optimization strategies, and relevant travel news influencing the hospitality landscape.   Designed specifically for hotel owners, operators, hospitality investors, travel professionals, and industry leaders, Check-In with Bryan empowers listeners to elevate their business strategies, harness industry-leading insights, and navigate the ever-evolving intersection of hospitality and travel.    Stay informed, inspired, and ahead of the competition with Bryan Fish and Reliance Hospitality.

Information

  • Creator
    Bryan Fish
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    76
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Check-In with Bryan
  • Show Website
    Check-In with Bryan