Written by a GM who started as a houseman. Real stories. Real frameworks. Real scripts. Everything this industry should have taught you.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
To every person who has ended a brutal shift and come back the next morning anyway. You are not just doing a job. You are carrying something most people will never understand — the weight of other people's comfort, their safety, their experiences. That is not ordinary work.
To the front desk agent who smiled at 11 PM. To the housekeeper who treated every room as if it were her own. To the night auditor who sat alone with the building. To the chef who never got the credit. To every GM who stayed long after everyone else left.
And to my brother, Juan Carlos — the best GM I have ever known. You taught me to love the people before you love the business. Everything in this book begins with what you showed me.
— A.S.Before anything else, let me be clear about what this book is and what it is not. I did not write this to inspire you to build a company. I did not write it to turn my journey into a template you should follow. There are enough books that try to do that. This is not one of them.
I wrote this because I am the manager you always asked for and never had. The director of operations who still has GM experience in his hands and feet — not just on a résumé. The voice you needed when you were standing in the middle of something hard and nobody around you said anything useful. The support that was not there when you needed it. So I wrote it down.
This is a manual. For the front desk agent who wants to understand why decisions above them get made the way they do. For the housekeeping supervisor who runs the most operationally complex department in the building and rarely gets acknowledged for it. For the GM who has been doing this fifteen years and still sometimes feels like they are improvising. For the F&B manager who knows something is wrong with the numbers but cannot name it precisely. For the new hire on week two still trying to understand what a hotel actually is.
Hospitality is one. Whether you are in a limited-service property with forty rooms and one part-time housekeeper, a select-service brand managing high occupancy on lean labor, or a full-service hotel with a restaurant, bar, spa, events department, and ownership expectations that never stop growing — it is the same industry. The same fundamental truth applies everywhere: people come to you in a vulnerable moment. They are away from home. They are tired. They are trusting that someone in your building will make that experience something more than a transaction. That is the job. Everything else is mechanics.
"I didn't write this because I figured it all out. I wrote it because I'm still in it, still learning, still making mistakes — and I got tired of pretending otherwise."
— A.S.I was born in South America and moved to the United States in 2009. After high school I enrolled in aviation academy. Before that, it had been soccer — my entire life built around the game. And then one day on a field, I waited for the feeling to return and it did not. Just like that. I was not heartbroken. I was ready for something else, though I did not know what yet.
Aviation was interesting. I was starting to genuinely enjoy it. But my family needed financial support — back home and here — and I could not pursue a long training program and also be the person my family needed me to be at that moment. When a job opportunity came, I took it. The understanding was that I would be working in an office. I was. I just did not realize I would be cleaning it first.
My GM, Justin, was the person who gave me the real opportunity — alongside my brother, he is one of the people most responsible for who I became. I worked houseman from 9 to 3 and security from 5 to 3. Security meant a flashlight and a radio. That was it. And somehow, from the very first week, I loved it. I loved the structure of the hotel. Its rhythm. The way the building shifted energy at different hours. The lobby at 6 AM versus the lobby at 10 PM. I did not know I was falling in love with an industry. I just knew I wanted to understand everything about how this place worked.
My English was not ready for a guest-facing role. So instead of waiting, I positioned myself. I spent time near the front desk. I learned to make keys. I printed registration cards. I answered phones when they let me. I watched how experienced agents handled complaints, how they read a guest, how they moved through a check-in with forty people in line behind the first one. I was learning without being enrolled in anything.
When I felt ready for a front desk role, I told my GM. He said I had everything he needed — except fluent English. So I spent three months preparing specifically for that conversation. When I came back, I was ready. He said next week. Then next month. One morning I walked into his office and said directly: I prepared. I speak English now. I am ready to contribute more to this hotel. And if there is no opportunity here, I need to find one somewhere else.
He did not give me the front desk job. He sent me to a full-service Crowne Plaza as a night auditor. And that was the job that turned me into an operator.
At the Crowne Plaza I had something rare: time. Night audit means hours with full system access and minimal interruption. I ran every report. I studied the pricing logic. I balanced accounts. I learned the PMS at a depth most people never reach — not through formal training but through curiosity and the willingness to sit with complexity until it made sense. I became what I still call a Jedi master of that system. That foundation — understanding the data layer of a hotel at a structural level — became the base of everything I have done since.
From there: FOM, then AGM. A 54-room Best Western where I learned rate management as a daily discipline. Airport and cruise properties — a completely different animal from transient guests. A Candlewood Suites extended-stay property. A hurricane I stayed through on property. A renovation. A VP with excellent suits and zero operational knowledge who made a career decision about me that stung — and who was gone two months later. A mentor, Mr. Ray — great GM, better human — who I said goodbye to when it was time to move on.
Then a Holiday Inn Express where I built one of the best team cultures I have ever been part of, and was promoted to a Home2 Suites that became one of the best performers in the company. Then COVID. Then two years away and what they gave back. Then Texas, and everything that came after.
The full story unfolds in the chapters ahead. What I want you to know before any lesson: everything here came from doing the work. Not studying it. Not theorizing about it. From cleaning offices, walking corridors with a flashlight at midnight, running reports at 3 AM, opening hotels under pressure, rebuilding broken ones, sitting across from ownership with numbers nobody wanted to see, and making the hard call when the situation demanded it. This is the accumulation of all of that. Use it.
Opening day feels like this. You have been building toward it for months. You have made hundreds of decisions under pressure with information you wished you had but did not. Your team is a mix of people who are ready and people who are not — you know the difference, but you need all of them today because there is no one else. The building is ninety-something percent finished. The flag goes up whether the punch list is complete or not.
You walk the lobby at 6 AM and find three things wrong, two things nobody discussed, and one thing that is genuinely beautiful — a space that now exists in the physical world the way it has only existed in your head until this moment. Terror and pride at the same time. Nobody tells you that in any training program.
When I was sent to help revamp and open a full-service property in Oklahoma, I had just arrived in Texas. My things were not fully moved. First week in a new state and the assignment was to walk into a property with significant issues and open it on a compressed timeline. The ownership pushed me to the limit — to always find accountability, to hold a standard with no room for excuses. We opened in record time. I am grateful for every moment of that pressure. Good ownership will always push you further than you push yourself, if you let it.
During pre-opening you are simultaneously a recruiter, trainer, vendor manager, brand liaison, systems architect, and project manager — with no clean edges between any of those roles. A vendor problem becomes a training problem that becomes a brand approval issue, all in the same conversation, on the same afternoon.
The most common mistake: optimizing for the visible product while underinvesting in operational infrastructure. The lobby furniture gets three revision rounds. The amenity packaging is debated for two weeks. Meanwhile the front desk team has not completed training because the timeline was compressed to perfect the physical space. Then the hotel opens looking beautiful and the first week of reviews discusses the check-in experience. Every time.
Contractors fix walls on a schedule. Nobody fixes a culture that was built wrong in the first ninety days on any schedule. Your front desk script cannot wait. Your housekeeping sequence cannot wait. Your service philosophy cannot wait. Start there — everything else arranges itself around it.
The first time I walked into a genuinely distressed property, I made the mistake every new turnaround manager makes. I saw what was wrong and I started fixing it immediately — visibly, energetically, with the kind of motion I wanted ownership and the team to read as leadership. I fixed the wrong things. Confidently, efficiently, with full commitment — and I fixed the wrong things.
The visible problems were symptoms. The actual cause was something quieter and deeper, embedded in how the team related to each other, in what had silently become normal, in what people had been given tacit permission to accept as the standard. Activity looks like leadership. They have the same energy signature. But leadership without diagnosis is confident improvisation — and in a distressed property, that can reinforce the exact dynamics that created the crisis.
At one property I managed, a VP was hired above the operations team who had excellent presentation skills and, as far as I could observe, had never actually run a hotel. He made a decision about my assignment based on his need to establish authority rather than any legitimate operational assessment. It hurt. Two months later he was let go. I have seen this pattern many times. If you are a VP or director reading this: support your GMs. They will make you look better than any report or well-worded email. And if you are a GM who has had this happen to you — it is not about you. Keep going.
"The person who knows the most about what's wrong with your hotel has been there three years and nobody has asked them yet. Go find that person on day one."
— A.S.The chain runs all the way back to you. When the numbers are wrong, ask what the culture is doing. When the culture is struggling, ask what leadership is doing. The answers will be uncomfortable. They will also be accurate. Own the entire chain.
The quality of your ownership relationship is determined almost entirely before things go wrong — not during. The trust that lets you push back professionally on a bad decision, deliver a difficult month honestly, or advocate for your team against a cost-cutting proposal was built in the ordinary months before the hard one arrived. You cannot build it retroactively.
Every strong ownership relationship I have had was built the same way: radical transparency, delivered consistently, before anyone asked for it. I told them what was happening, what I was doing about it, and what I expected — whether the news was good or bad — before they had to ask. That single habit, maintained without exception, is the foundation of being genuinely trusted as an operator.
Never allow ownership to encounter a difficult month without context from you first. Call the day before the report is distributed. Own what is yours. Explain what happened, what you are doing, and what you expect. Surprises destroy trust faster than bad performance. Transparency builds it faster than good performance.
My brother Juan Carlos taught me the fundamental before I had a single management title: love the people before you love the business. When you love the business first, the people become instruments. You optimize them toward an outcome. You manage them against metrics. And they know it. Not because you tell them — because people always know when they are being managed toward something rather than genuinely invested in.
When you love the people first — when you genuinely invest in their growth, see their contribution, advocate for them, and tell them directly what they mean to the operation — the business results follow as a natural consequence. This is not soft. It is the single highest-leverage management decision you make every day.
"You can train almost any skill in hospitality. You cannot train someone to genuinely care about the person in front of them. Hire the one who already does. Teach them everything else."
— A.S.When I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express to fix what I had identified as task force GM, something happened that I did not expect: we built one of the best team cultures I have ever been part of. We changed the image and production of that property. My RSM pushed me hard — and I am grateful for it. That culture became the foundation for the next step in my career. Culture is not soft. It is the most direct path to hard results.
Picture the hotel F&B outlet you know. The menu has not changed meaningfully in two years. The wine list reflects the distributor's inventory more than the local market. The servers know the steps of service but have never been trained on the art of it. The bar has two specialty cocktails that have been there since opening. And it loses money most months, which the management team treats as the normal economics of hotel F&B.
It is not normal. It is the predictable result of treating an outlet as a brand obligation rather than a business opportunity. I have watched the same physical space transform from a money-losing obligation into a genuine neighborhood destination — not through a renovation, not through a new chef, but through a decision that this outlet was going to be excellent, followed by every operational choice being made in service of that decision.
You push rate aggressively. ADR climbs. Revenue looks stable on the rooms line. But occupancy softens — fewer guests in the building. Here is what that softer occupancy does to F&B: it destroys it. Your outlet needs the same labor to open regardless of whether you are at sixty or eighty percent occupancy. The fixed cost structure does not flex — and when occupancy drops, F&B revenue falls faster because you lose every ancillary dollar that a body in the building generates.
ADR and occupancy are not separate levers. When you pull one, everything moves — including the parts of the P&L you were not thinking about. Optimize for total property revenue, not rooms revenue alone.
The guests are in the building. They are hungry. They are already your customer. Digitize the ordering. Simplify the experience. Train for fast, accurate fulfillment. The demand exists. Stop making it too hard to capture.
I watched a team member write a room service order on a notepad — not in 1990, in 2023. The system at that property was a phone, a notepad, and a runner who walked the paper to the kitchen. The same process this industry used in 1985. And I thought: this is ridiculous. Not the team member, who was doing exactly what they had been asked. The system was ridiculous. And nobody was building something better because the people with the context to build it correctly were too busy operating to build anything.
So I studied technology on nights and weekends. I built what I needed. The gap between where hospitality is technologically and where it could be is enormous. The operators who close that gap in their own buildings — one problem at a time — will have a compounding advantage over those still accepting the manual process because it is what has always been done.
At the Crowne Plaza as a night auditor, I had hours every shift with full system access and almost no interruption. I ran every report. I studied every pricing configuration. I learned how occupancy connected to rate, rate to revenue, revenue to forecast. By the time I moved into management roles, I understood the data layer of a hotel in a way most managers with twice my experience had never developed. Technology is not separate from operations. It is an expression of how well you understand them.
Burnout in this industry does not look the way you imagine. It is not the person who stops caring, who goes through the motions, who clearly does not want to be there. For operators who are genuinely good at this work, it looks different. The results are still there. The numbers are mostly right. The team is functional. From the outside, everything appears to be working.
From the inside, there are no new ideas. No new energy. No new perspective. You are running on the reserve that years of investment built, and that reserve is depleting in a way that a weekend cannot fix. I ran through COVID like that. The Home2 was one of the best performers in the company. Then COVID arrived and reshaped everything, and the combination of that pressure and the years that preceded it produced exactly that: still present, still performing, but running on empty.
I took two years away from hospitality. A unique opportunity in e-commerce appeared and I took it. It paid my bills and taught me things about technology and systems I brought back when I returned. But underneath all of that learning, something else was happening: I was recovering. Getting back the curiosity. The energy. The ability to think creatively about problems. When I came back to hospitality — because of course I came back, this is who I am — I came back as a different operator. Two years of perspective I could not have purchased any other way.
"I am glad I went back for that houseman job. It was, and it still is, the most important job I ever had."
— A.S.The operator who performs at a high level for a decade is not the one who sacrificed the most. It is the one who figured out how to last. Build recovery into your professional life the same way you build contingency into your operation. It is part of the job.
If I could go back to the version of myself who showed up for the houseman job — the one who did not yet speak fluent English, who had never done this kind of work, who arrived from somewhere else carrying a dead soccer dream and an aviation program he had to leave behind — here is what I would tell him.
Everything you are doing right now matters more than you know. The floor you are cleaning. The keys you are making at the front desk. The security shift where you walk corridors with a flashlight and a radio and nothing else. These are not waiting. These are learning. Stay curious about every person in this building. Position yourself near the work you want to do. And when you are ready — when you have genuinely prepared — walk into the office and say so.
The chaos does not go away. What changes is your capacity for it — your speed at identifying what actually matters, your ability to hold uncertainty without being paralyzed by it. These grow with you, if you allow every hard period to teach you something rather than simply survive it.
Be harder on your systems than you are on your people. Most operational failure is systems failure that looks like people failure. Before you ask who failed, ask what process allowed the failure to occur.
Love the people before you love the business. I received this from my brother before I had a single management title. I have tested it in every property — limited, select, full service, pre-opening, turnaround, task force. It has never been wrong.
Protect your integrity completely. Everything else can be rebuilt. Integrity, once genuinely compromised, is extraordinarily difficult to recover. The moments when protecting it costs something are exactly the moments when it matters most.
And explore life. Genuinely. The person who becomes only a GM eventually runs out of things to give that only a full person can give.
"The hotels that perform best over the longest periods are led by people who figured out how to last. Not how to work the hardest. How to last."
— A.S.I started with a flashlight and a radio. I did not know then that hospitality would become the thing I built a professional life around. The most important job I ever had was the houseman job. Not because it was impressive. Because it taught me that every role in this industry has something to teach you. The people who get the most from a career in hospitality are the ones who never stop letting it.
Hospitality is one. Whether you are managing forty rooms or four hundred — the truth underneath is the same. People come to you away from home. They are trusting that someone in your building will make that experience worth remembering. That is the job. Everything else is mechanics.
Somehow, you will manage. You always have.
— Alejandro Soria
Alejandro Soria was born in South America and moved to the United States in 2009. He began his career as a houseman and spent the next decade building operational expertise from the ground up: night auditor, front office manager, assistant general manager, and general manager across limited, select, and full-service hotels spanning multiple national brands.
He has managed airport and cruise properties, navigated full renovations, worked through natural disasters on property, led pre-opening teams, turned around distressed properties, and overseen multi-state task force portfolios.
He founded Quantum Hospitality Solutions — AI-powered operational tools built by a hotel operator for hotel operators. Every product was built to solve a specific problem he encountered personally: Attenda, ReviewFlow, EventFlow, ShuttleFlow, DirectoryOS, SEO Engine, and Content Studio.
He is not a tech founder who studied hotels. He is an operator who studied technology.
AI-powered operational tools built by a hotel operator, for hotel operators.
Attenda · ReviewFlow · EventFlow · ShuttleFlow · DirectoryOS · SEO Engine · Content Studio