The Lights On Podcast

Kin Sio
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Marketing

The Lights On Podcast features conversations with hospitality leaders about the commercial strategies that drive hotel performance and growth.

  1. 2d ago

    What Makes a Hospitality Brand Endure With Sean Dee

    Sean Dee is the Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at OUTRIGGER Hospitality Group, a Hawai'i-based company specializing in iconic beach resorts across the globe. He leads the company's global commercial strategy across marketing, sales, revenue management, brand, and distribution. Sean was named HSMAI's 2022 Corporate Marketing Professional of the Year and serves as Chairperson of the Hawai'i Visitors and Convention Bureau, having also served on the HSMAI Americas Board of Directors. His leadership roles at Levi Strauss & Co., Hard Rock International, and Anschutz Entertainment Group shaped his expertise in brand reinvention and hospitality innovation. In this episode… Enduring hospitality brands do not survive change by abandoning who they are. They evolve by returning to what made people care in the first place, then deciding where to grow from there. Sean Dee, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at OUTRIGGER Hospitality Group, has run that play twice, first reviving Hard Rock International and now repositioning OUTRIGGER. Kin Sio sits down with Sean on The Lights On Podcast to break down how brands endure. When Dee joined Hard Rock in 2003, the brand was ten straight years into decline and had drifted into a museum, an academy, and Hard Rock food served on Delta flights. His team tracked down the original founders, Peter Morton and Isaac Tigrett, to understand what the 1971 London cafe was actually built on, then rebuilt the brand around one ownable idea: delivering experiences that rock. They widened the music from a narrow hard-rock genre to hip hop and other genres, opening the brand to younger, higher-spending guests. Dee estimates the enterprise value grew to roughly six times what it was when the turnaround began. At OUTRIGGER, Dee applied the same discipline. He narrowed the company from a mix of airport hotels, mid-market flags, and the three-star Ohana brand down to beachfront Outrigger Resorts, positioned where local culture meets world-class hospitality. Under KSL Capital Partners, which acquired the company in late 2016, OUTRIGGER now runs 31 properties, including 13 beachfront resorts across all four major Hawaiian islands plus Thailand, the Maldives, and Mauritius. As Chairperson of the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Dee also makes a pointed case on tourism: the problem was never the 10.4 million visitor peak, but the tens of thousands of illegal vacation units operating in residential neighborhoods, while visitors already contribute a billion dollars a year in tax revenue.

  2. Jul 16

    Service Over Structure: From #58 to #3 on Tripadvisor With Kiana Beimes

    Kiana Beimes is the General Manager of the OUTRIGGER Waikiki Paradise Hotel in Honolulu, a boutique property known for authentic Hawaiian hospitality. Under her leadership, the hotel rose from #58 to as high as #3 on Tripadvisor and completed a ten-month renovation while maintaining guest satisfaction and keeping her entire 60-person team employed. Kiana was named the 2026 Hawaiʻi Women in Lodging & Tourism Woman of the Year, recognizing her leadership, community engagement, and impact on Hawaiʻi's visitor industry. In this episode… How does a hotel climb from #58 to #3 on Tripadvisor while it's torn up by construction? For Kiana Beimes, General Manager of the OUTRIGGER Waikiki Paradise Hotel, the answer is service over structure: the team's service outweighs anything the building throws at a guest. Kin Sio and Keri Brown sit down with Kiana on The Lights On Podcast to unpack how she did it. Kiana took over a 443-room property as a first-time GM and inherited a 10-month renovation with no buffer floors and no option to close. She kept all 60 team members employed, held rates and occupancy through the summer, and trained her hosts to treat every complaint as a chance to build loyalty. When a wedding group was stuck waiting on half-working elevators, she left a cultural ceremony, ran back to the hotel, and personally walked guests up through the back-of-house service corridors with cold drinks in hand. The results show up in the reviews. The hotel moved from #58 to #3 on Tripadvisor, and guests now name individual hosts as the reason they'll return. Kiana breaks down the "problem solving, not problem reporting" culture she built, why she tells her team they have two goals (make revenue and earn good reviews), and the low-cost touches, handwritten welcome cards, shell leis, and lobby lei-making, that create memories without a big budget. It's a practical playbook for any operator working with a fixed building and a real budget: service is the lever you can always pull, and it's often the one that moves rate and reviews the most.

  3. Jul 9

    Intersection of Hospitality Technology and Profitability With Travis Weber

    Travis Weber is the Vice President of Sales for the Americas at Duetto, a leading revenue management platform that helps hotels maximize profitability through dynamic pricing and data-driven insights. Duetto has been recognized as the #1 Revenue Management System in the HotelTechAwards for four consecutive years, reflecting its strong reputation in hotel technology. Travis brings a unique perspective to hospitality technology, having started his career in marketing for the San Antonio Spurs, transitioned to ski resort sales in his hometown of Taos, New Mexico, and worked on the distribution side at Expedia. In this episode… Where should a hotel start with revenue technology? According to Travis Weber, VP of Sales for the Americas at Duetto, you start by naming the pain you want to solve, not by shopping for a tool. Identify the friction (aging systems, reactive pricing, missed revenue), then work backward to the fix. It is fine to start simple with a PMS or RMS and build from there. Kin Sio sits down with Travis on The Lights On Podcast to talk about the intersection of hotel technology and profitability. Travis has seen the commercial side from several angles: selling ski trips in his hometown of Taos, marketing for the San Antonio Spurs, and working the OTA side at Expedia before joining Duetto, the revenue management platform ranked number one in the HotelTechAwards four years running. His take on OTAs cuts against the usual frustration. Treat them as a marketing arm, not the enemy. They spend heavily to understand buyer behavior and remove friction, and back when OTAs started, many hotels raised rates roughly 20% to cover the commission, so the whole industry got a bump. If a booking is truly incremental, the commission is closer to a customer acquisition cost than lost revenue. Kin frames it with the iPhone: Apple sells direct, but you still find iPhones at Target, Best Buy, and Costco, because more storefronts mean more reach. On the systems themselves, Travis is direct that the biggest barrier is mindset, not budget. The smallest hotel on Duetto is six rooms, and vacation rentals use it too, so size is not the wall people assume. Above 100 rooms without an RMS, you are likely leaving money on the table: that is 100 rooms across multiple channels across 365-plus days a year, and a human revenue manager will miss something. He reframes the cost too, noting a 12-cent ADR change can offset the price of the tool. The bigger story is Duetto's acquisition of HotStats about a year ago, which pushes the focus from top-line RevPAR toward bottom-line profitability, the total-profit-per-guest thinking Duetto carried over from its start as a Las Vegas casino tool. AI, Travis argues, will not replace revenue managers. Its real job is breaking down the data silos that have kept hotel systems from talking to each other.

  4. Jul 2

    Human Touch in Hotel Tech Evolution With Bernard Tan

    Bernard Tan is the Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Castle Resorts & Hotels, a Honolulu-based hospitality management company operating a diverse portfolio of hotels, condominium resorts, and vacation rentals across Hawaii and New Zealand. With over 20 years of hospitality and consulting experience, he leads commercial strategy across revenue management, distribution, digital marketing, and technology. Originally from Singapore, Bernard began with an accounting background before pursuing his passion for hospitality. He is especially focused on helping hotels integrate technology, improve performance, and preserve the human touch in the guest experience. In this episode… As AI and automation collapse the travel booking journey, hotels face a real risk: turning every guest interaction into a commodity. Bernard Tan, Chief Commercial Officer at Castle Resorts & Hotels, argues the fix is empathy first, technology second. A guest can travel an entire day, checking in by phone, clearing security by facial recognition, boarding by a face scan, and never speak to a single person before reaching the front desk. That makes the hotel's first human welcome matter more, not less. Kin Sio and co-host Keri Brown sit down with Bernard on The Lights On Podcast to unpack the human touch in the evolution of hotel tech. Bernard runs commercial strategy across one of Hawaii's most complex portfolios: 19-plus properties spanning hotels, condominiums, and vacation rentals across five Hawaiian islands and New Zealand. His core argument is that the industry's biggest bottleneck is not innovation, it's integration, and that revenue management has outgrown rate-setting into a three-part discipline of optimization, distribution, and digital enablement. The conversation digs into the rate parity gap between sell rate and net rate, how AI is reshaping who decides what a guest sees, and why keeping a human in the loop still wins. Bernard also breaks down Castle's decision to affiliate two properties with Wyndham's Trademark Collection soft brand, how they protected each property's identity, and the early read on incremental revenue. He closes with practical advice for independent owner-operators staring at a messy tech stack: map every system first, hire for the full commercial spectrum, and remember that guests choose a destination before they choose a property.

  5. Jun 25

    How Michael Russell Turned a Distressed Maui Motel Into an Award-Winning Hostel

    Michael Russell is Co-founder of Howzit Hostels and Malama Capital, where he focuses on hospitality investing, hostel operations, boutique lodging, and experiential real estate. He has experience across short-term rentals, commercial real estate, and hospitality assets, with a focus on acquisitions, repositioning, operations, and portfolio growth. During COVID, Michael acquired a distressed one-star motel and transformed it into Howzit Hostels, growing annual revenue from $500,000 to $2.4 million and earning Hostelworld's 2024 award for #1 Small Hostel in North America. He also hosts The Hotel Investor Playbook, where he shares practical insights on scaling hotel investments. In this episode… Turning an overlooked property into a resilient hospitality business is rarely about the asset. It comes down to seeing value where others see risk, then operating with discipline through thin margins and shocks. During COVID, Michael Russell bought a distressed one-star Maui motel for $800,000 with seller financing and grew it into Howzit Hostels, a $2.4 million brand that earned Hostelworld's 2024 award for the #1 Small Hostel in North America. Kin Sio sits down with Michael on The Lights On Podcast to unpack how he did it. Michael, co-founder of Howzit Hostels and Malama Capital in Maui, walks through the full arc: a W-2 sales job in Hawaii to stack capital, buying single-family homes below construction cost coming out of the Great Recession, then jumping into short-term rentals in 2015 when Airbnb was still new. Each phase funded the next, and the through-line is a single question he keeps asking: where can I find value where others are not looking? That contrarian habit is what led him to a one-star motel nobody wanted and the design-forward hostel model he borrowed from brands in Europe and the mainland. He also gets honest about the hard parts: running 40 to 50 percent over the renovation budget, losing his own home in the 2023 Lahaina wildfire, and the slim-margin reality of hospitality that makes cash reserves and knowing your numbers non-negotiable. The back half turns practical on distribution. Michael treats OTAs as advertising partners rather than enemies, leaning on the billboard effect for discovery, while arguing the real prize in direct bookings is owning the guest relationship, not just shaving commission. He closes on building systems for time freedom, from calendar mastery to the email problem he still hasn't solved, and why his own podcast skips the sales pitch.

  6. Jun 18

    Broker's View of Hawaii's Hotel Market With Kevin Aucello

    Kevin Aucello is the Principal at Powell & Aucello, a Honolulu-based hotel brokerage and advisory firm specializing in hotel investment, transactions, and development across Hawaii, Micronesia, and the South Pacific. With over 30 years of experience in Hawaii's hotel investment market, he has been involved in more than $1.5 billion in hotel real estate projects and is recognized for his deep market expertise and industry connections. Prior to Powell & Aucello, Kevin held senior roles with Marriott International, Outrigger Resorts, and CBRE Hotels, building a collaborative approach and deep insight into Hawaii's complex, supply-constrained hotel landscape. In this episode… What actually drives a Hawaii hotel's value? Broker Kevin Aucello points to scarcity. New hotels are nearly impossible to build, so cap rates run about 150 basis points below mainland primary markets, even after rising interest rates pushed them up. Kin Sio sits down with Kevin on The Lights On Podcast to talk through how owners should price, position, and time a sale. Kevin has spent more than 30 years in Hawaii's hotel investment market, first as a broker at CBRE, then leading development for Marriott and Outrigger, before co-founding Powell & Aucello in 2020. That dual seat, owner side and brand side, shapes how he reads a deal. Higher interest rates have pushed going-in cap rates 100 to 150 basis points above the 2019 peak, when prime Waikiki assets traded near a five cap. But because almost no new supply can come online, demand for well-priced assets stays strong, and owners who price realistically still find serious buyers. The conversation gets specific on where owners lose money. Chasing an unsolicited offer or running a quiet sale alone can stamp a property as "damaged goods" once it sits too long, and a broker's 3 to 5% fee is small next to that risk. On the brand side, Kevin describes one owner who left an estimated $5 to $8 million in key money on the table by negotiating a franchise deal without help. He also explains why soft brands have become a practical middle path for boutique hotels, and what the Ko Olina land deal signals about appetite for major new development in Hawaii. One theme repeats throughout: get professional help. Whether it is revenue management, distribution, or the sale itself, Kevin's view is that the right expert moves the top line and the exit price by more than the fee ever costs.

  7. Jun 11

    5 Questions That Separate Real Hotel AI From Expensive Guessing Games With Josh Graham

    Josh Graham is the Head of Market Development for North America at Cloudbeds, a leading hospitality technology company that provides unified, cloud-based solutions for hotels and other lodging businesses. In his role, he drives market awareness and helps hoteliers adopt unified, data-driven solutions to modernize their tech stacks and improve performance. Before Cloudbeds, Josh spent over a decade in hotel operations and held senior roles at TravelClick, Amadeus, Revenue Analytics, Salesforce Travel, and FLYR for Hospitality. His combination of operational experience and tech expertise allows him to bridge hotelier needs and the adoption of innovative technology. In this episode… Real hotel AI and expensive guesswork can look identical in a demo. The difference shows up in production, and it comes down to data: AI built on fragmented systems can only guess, while AI connected to one source of truth can actually make decisions. On this episode, Kin Sio sits down with Josh Graham, Head of Market Development for North America at Cloudbeds, on The Lights On Podcast to explain how independent hotels turn unified data into a real AI advantage. Josh's core argument flips the last 20 years of hotel tech on its head. Every major shift rewarded scale: the internet handed bookings to the OTAs, mobile rewarded the smoothest app, the cloud favored the big brands. AI breaks that pattern. It rewards context, and context lives at the property, not with Marriott, Hilton, or Booking.com. The independent hotel knows what happens after a guest walks through the door. The brands and the OTAs don't. That advantage only pays off if the data lives in one place. A hotel in 2026 is managing distribution across 30-plus channels and competing against OTAs that spend $20 billion a year on marketing, yet most properties still run ten separate tools, ten logins, and ten versions of the truth about what's happening in the building. That fragmentation was annoying ten years ago and expensive five years ago; this year it's the thing holding AI back. Josh walks through how to audit the stack, the five questions that reveal whether a vendor's AI can act or only suggest, and why the PMS has to grow beyond the 1990s records database it was built to be.

  8. Jun 4

    The AI That Lets Hotels Breathe With Jessie Fischer

    Jessie Fischer is the Founder and CEO of GuestOS, an AI-native communications platform that powers real-time, multilingual guest engagement across hotels, destinations, and global events. Under her leadership, GuestOS has gained rapid traction through industry referrals, with its AI teammates handling up to 30% of hotel calls and freeing staff to focus on in-person guest experiences. Drawing on her early experience working in her family's hotel near Yosemite National Park and as an Airbnb superhost, Jessie brings a unique blend of hospitality insight and tech startup expertise to solving operational challenges in the hotel industry. In this episode… Most hotel front desks lose hours every day to the same handful of questions: check-in times, pet policies, directions. Jessie Fischer, founder and CEO of GuestOS, builds AI voice agents that answer those calls so staff can give their attention to the guests in front of them. Kin Sio sits down with Jessie on The Lights On Podcast to talk about AI that protects hospitality instead of replacing it. Jessie grew up answering guest questions at her family's hotels near Yosemite, starting at age 12. The questions then are the questions now: roughly 70% of what a front desk handles is repetitive. After a decade in tech startups across food robotics, education, and fitness, she came back to hospitality and saw the gap clearly. When ChatGPT arrived, she built GuestOS to handle those FAQs in a way hoteliers would actually trust, instead of adding a tenth or fifteenth platform to a team that already has no time to use the ones they have. What sets her approach apart is who she builds for. GuestOS is designed around the front desk staff who use it every day, not just the owners and GMs who sign the contract. Within the first 10 days at a property like Luma Hotel in San Francisco, the AI teammate handles about 30% of calls. The product has grown entirely through industry referrals, with no cold outreach, because the operators who use it become its advocates.

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Ratings & Reviews

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About

The Lights On Podcast features conversations with hospitality leaders about the commercial strategies that drive hotel performance and growth.

Information

  • Creator
    Kin Sio
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    19
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The Lights On Podcast (c) 2026
  • Show Website
    The Lights On Podcast

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