By Paprika Le Bourgeois, Hotel Asset Manager at Katara Hospitality in collaboration with Sustainability Kiosk
Fifteen to twenty years ago, hotel owners were saying the same things about Revenue Management that many are saying about sustainability today.
“My reservations manager can do this.” “I know what price to sell at, I don’t need a system to tell me that.” “What is the ROI?”
At the time, Revenue Management was seen as expensive, overly technical, and disconnected from the realities of running a hotel. Many owners believed pricing could be managed manually, based on experience and gut feel. Today, it is considered one of the most important drivers of hotel profitability. No serious operator questions its value. No owner builds a budget without it.
Sustainability is at exactly the same inflection point.
The debate is no longer whether it matters. The question is whether it is being managed with the same discipline that Revenue Management eventually earned.
The Parallels between the two is uncomfortably accurate.
Consider where the two disciplines were at the similar stages of maturity:
| Revenue Management (then) | Sustainability (now) | |
| Maturity evolution | In the early 2000s, limited to large hotel chains. Today, widespread among branded hotels. | Branded chains have ESG targets or commitments. But most hotels don’t track sustainability data in a structured way. Even fewer owners use that data to inform financial decisions. |
| Ownership | Pricing split between GM, front desk, and sales ; often in conflict. | Energy tracked by engineering, waste by F&B, carbon by finance, procurement by suppliers. No single view. No single owner. |
| Mindset | Reactive: “We’ll discount rates if occupancy looks low on Thursday.” | Reactive: “We’ll sort recycling and turn off lights in empty rooms.” |
| Software | Seen as a cost center: “We already have someone doing this.” Seen as a threat: “A system won’t know my market better than I do.” | Seen as a compliance expense or a CSR initiative. Seen as unnecessary complexity: “We’re too small for that.” |
| Data | Occupancy data existed, but lived in spreadsheets. Patterns were ignored. | Utility bills exist but are not benchmarked, segmented, or acted on. |
The shift in Revenue Management was from reaction to anticipation: forecasting demand, shaping it, optimizing for it. Sustainability needs the same shift: from responding to regulation to anticipating investor and guest expectations.
What Revenue Management Got Right
Revenue Management did not succeed because hotels suddenly believed in it. It succeeded because better data and better decisions drove profit. And it got there through four deliberate structural choices.
A dedicated role with accountability. The role came with measurable targets, and bonuses followed. Over time, the model evolved, from property level to cluster models, with one RM covering several hotels, scaling expertise without scaling cost proportionally.
Data discipline before everything else. Before dynamic pricing, before software, the industry had to agree on what to measure and how. STR benchmarking created a common data language. The introduction of STAR reports gave owners an external reference point for the first time, the moment Revenue Management stopped being an internal opinion and became a performance discipline. The principle is simple: you cannot optimize what you cannot consistently measure.
A common language — the KPI layer. RevPAR, ADR, occupancy. Three numbers that every owner, operator, and investor could hold in their head simultaneously. This shared scorecard enabled board-level conversations and cross-property comparison. Sustainability currently has no equivalent. GRESB, GHG protocols, energy intensity metrics- these exist, but they are not yet the RevPAR of sustainability.
Software as backbone, not shortcut. The RMS did not replace the Revenue Manager’s judgment. It made that judgment scalable, consistent, and auditable. It automated what could be automated (daily pricing, availability) so the human could focus on strategy, exceptions, and relationships. It also enabled a shift from monthly reviews to daily, then real-time management. The result: implementing RM with an RMS typically increases RevPAR by 5–10%, translating into a 3–7% GOP improvement. That is not a marginal gain; it is a structural uplift.
These were not natural evolutions. They were deliberate structural choices. Sustainability requires the same.
Reality Check: Why Sustainability is Harder and Good Intentions Have Not Been Enough
At Sustainability Kiosk, we audit hotel food waste, energy, and carbon performance across UAE and the wider GCC. What we consistently find is a gap between what owners believe is happening and what is actually happening — and that gap is not a values problem. It is a structure problem.
In a recent diagnostic audit at a luxury dual-brand property in UAE, food waste accounted for 139 tonnes over six months — approximately 21% of all waste generated. Food waste per cover was running at 714 grams against a luxury hotel benchmark of 120 to 180 grams. Nearly four times the upper limit.
The property had engaged leadership. Procurement controls were strong. But production controls scored 50%. Surplus diversion scored 50%. Composting readiness scored 17%.
The data existed. It simply was not being used.
At current volumes, the annual food cost sitting in waste bins is approximately AED 4.95 million. The carbon footprint of that waste alone is approximately 688 tonnes of CO₂e per year. A 20% upstream reduction — achievable through production controls, portion standardisation, and buffet forecasting alone — would recover AED 992,000 annually and reduce required composting infrastructure from a 1,000 kg/day unit to 700 kg/day, avoiding AED 150,000 to 250,000 in capital expenditure.
These are not projections from a model. They are calculations from a single property, over six months, using operational data the hotel already had.
This is what good intentions look like without structure. The leadership was there. The procurement discipline was there. But without a named owner for food waste performance, without weekly tracking, without production-level controls embedded in daily operations, the data sat in logbooks and the opportunity sat in landfill.
Sustainability is structurally harder than Revenue Management, and it is worth being honest about that.
Revenue Managment touched one function. Sustainability is a system, cuts across every department simultaneously: operations, engineering, procurement, F&B, HR. The change management requirement is an order of magnitude larger.
There is a physical asset dimension. Revenue Management required a software investment. Sustainability often requires capex (capitel expenditure): LED retrofits, heat pump replacements, composter installations. The decision chain is longer and involves asset managers, lenders, and sometimes planning authorities.
The data problem is more complex. A PMS captures revenue data in one place. Energy, water, waste, and carbon data come from entirely different systems, often manual, often incomplete, and rarely connected.
Split incentives create structural tension. In managed hotels, the operator controls day-to-day decisions, but the owner bears the capital cost. Sustainability improvements that reduce energy bills benefit the operator’s P&L; the investment is on the owner. This misalignment rarely exists in Revenue Management.
Regulatory pressure is real but uneven. In some markets, sustainability reporting is already mandatory. In others, it remains optional. This creates inconsistent urgency across portfolios.
This is not an argument against urgency. It is an explanation of why good intentions have not been enough, and why structure matters even more here than it did in Revenue Management.
What High Performing Properties Do Differently
The difference is not budget or brand. It is governance. The properties that improve consistently share four characteristics: a named individual who owns sustainability performance with measurable targets; data tracked weekly rather than when the utility bill arrives; sustainability KPIs on the HOD meeting agenda; and capital proposals required to include an energy and carbon impact assessment.
When that structure is in place, the results are not marginal:
- Resort in Morocco: Food waste reduction programme. $5K investment. $950K in savings in year one.
- City hotel in Dubai: Same approach. $5K investment. $63K in savings in year one.
- City hotel in Canada: $10M+ investment in technical upgrades. 85% carbon emission reduction. 4.5-year payback. 10% green asset value premium.
- Resort in the Maldives: $600K investment. Under three-year payback. 16% energy savings. 700 tonnes of CO₂ avoided per year.
The difference between properties that improve and those that do not is rarely about intention; it is almost always about governance.
The Playbook Sustainability Needs Now
Five structural moves, each one mirroring what Revenue Management did.
- Assign ownership and make it accountable: Not “the GM is responsible.” A named individual with a defined scope, measurable targets, and a reason to care beyond good values. This can be a dedicated sustainability lead, a shared role across properties, or an external specialist. The model matters less than the accountability.
- Fix the data layer first. Before dashboards. Before certifications. Before selecting software. Agree on what you are measuring, how you are measuring it, and how frequently. Revenue Managers know this principle better than anyone: garbage in, garbage out.
- Set clear targets and build a common scorecard. Energy cost per occupied room. Water per guest. Waste per cover. Carbon intensity per square metre. The specific metrics matter less than the consistency. Pick two or three that every owner in your portfolio tracks the same way. Add them to regular reports. Do not change them every year.
- Use software; do not Excel your way through this. Spreadsheets are how Revenue Managers operated before RM became serious. The moment the industry moved to dedicated systems, performance accelerated. Sustainability is still largely in the spreadsheet era. When selecting software, prioritise ease of use for on-property teams, owner-readable reporting, live dashboards, intensity metrics alongside absolutes, and strong provider support. And then, the most important part — actually use it.
- Build capability and embed it in operations. Train all teams regularly. Sustainability embedded in operations means it comes up in the morning briefing, it is on the HOD agenda, and the person closest to the problem (the chef, the engineer, the housekeeper) has been asked for their input and knows their role. That is when it stops being a programme and starts being how the hotel runs.
One more lever that is often overlooked: contract structures. Energy performance contracts and solar PPAs, for example, allow sustainability improvements to be funded without owner capex, and directly address the split-incentive problem. Use the operator’s knowledge and relationships here.
The Same Playbook: A Different Dimension of Performance
Revenue Management did not succeed because the industry suddenly “believed” in it. It succeeded because it demonstrated that better data and better decisions demonstrably improved profitability and asset value.
Sustainability is now reaching that same point. The hotels that make the shift first will not just report better sustainability numbers — they will run better, more profitable, more resilient hotels.
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Guest Contributions
Paprika brings over 15 years of experience at the intersection of hospitality, technology, and asset performance. In her current role at Katara Hospitality, she oversees the financial and operational performance of the company’s European hotel portfolio. Before that, she served as Director of Customer Success and Product Design at Infor Software Solutions, where she led a global team of 35+ consultants, managed one of the hospitality industry’s largest hotel Revenue Management Software rollouts across 4,500+ properties, and contributed to the product strategy for hospitality revenue management solutions.
Paprika holds an Executive MBA from HEC Paris (Doha), with a specialization in transforming business for Sustainability. She also completed executive certifications from Yale School of Management in Natural Capital and Managing Sustainable Assets.
She loves complex challenges and turning them into practical actions. Strongly believes that, with the right structure and mindset, there is always a solution.
