The problem is not the data
I spent more than 15 years in the analytics industry before starting Scoop.
Long enough to know that the field has a consistent failure mode:
- Building more data access
- More dashboards
- More reports
- More charts
And the same people doing the same things they were doing before, because the data was there but the interpretation was not.
When I set out to understand whether hospitality was a fit for what we are building, I talked to a lot of people in the industry.
- Operators.
- Franchise executives.
- Property managers.
One conversation with a senior executive at one of the world's largest hotel franchise brands helped crystallize something I had been thinking about for a while.
It was all a structural gap..
Not just the snapshot of what is happening, but the why, and what do we do about it. That is where hospitality analytics is headed.
That framing maps exactly to what we keep hearing across industries.
The monitoring vs. investigation gap is not a hospitality-specific problem.
But in hospitality it has a structural explanation that makes it unusually persistent.
What brands are actually paid to do
Here is the thing most people outside the industry do not realize.
Hotel brands like Wyndham, Choice, Hilton, and Marriott are not primarily management companies.
They are franchise businesses.
They earn their revenue through fees:
- Marketing fees
- Brand fees
- Reservation fees
Those fees are calculated as a percentage of the franchisee's top-line revenue.
That means the brand's financial interest is in the franchisee's revenue.
- Not their operating costs.
- Not their labor efficiency.
- Not their housekeeping schedule or their insurance spend.
We are top-line focused. That is how we are compensated. We try to help with tips and tricks for improving margins, but we are not their management company.
This is an incentive structure.
Brands are designed to drive bookings, protect brand standards, and grow the network.
Hotel operational intelligence on the cost side is simply not their business model.
And even when brands do push operational tools out to franchisees, adoption is voluntary and uneven.
One executive told me directly:
Even free services don't get everyone to sign up.
What the data shows versus what operators need
Most franchisees are not running without data.
They have property management systems.
They get RevPAR reports. Some receive P and L summaries.
The data exists.
What does not exist (for most of them) is:
Anyone whose job it is to tell them what any of it means for their specific property.
Franchise brands with 9,000 properties are not going to send someone to your property to walk through your expense ratios.
Management companies that charge 3% to 5% of gross to actively run a portfolio provide that service, but most independent franchisees do not use management companies.
So you end up with a:
Diagnostic analytics gap
The data says what happened.
Nobody is consistently explaining why, or what to do about it.
The cost side of the business is where this gap hurts most.
Industry data shows operating costs at U.S. hotels have risen roughly 4% year over year, while RevPAR growth has been running at under 2% through mid-2025.
That spread only gets closed by tightening operations.
But tightening operations requires knowing where the leaks are, and knowing where the leaks are requires investigation, not just reporting.
You have dashboards. You have PMS data. What you don't have is anyone telling you what it means for your specific property and what to do about it.
This is exactly what agentic analytics was designed to address: not a better dashboard, but an autonomous investigation layer that runs on your data and surfaces what matters without waiting for someone to ask the right question.
What the death spiral taught me about pattern detection
To explain what this looks like in practice, let me use an example from a different industry.
One of our first deployments was with a large chain of pawn stores. About 1,200 locations.
Our team sat with the COO and senior operators and encoded exactly how they investigated performance across their network.
One of the patterns they had identified over years of operations they called:
The death spiral
A store manager gets excited and starts lending aggressively.
More items come in, which looks great on paper.
Revenue ticks up.
The manager feels good.
But inventory builds. They start to get nervous. They pull back on lending.
And 4 to 6 months later, revenue falls off a cliff.
The whole thing was detectable from the drift pattern in the data, weeks before the damage was visible in the P and L.
The district managers who visited stores already knew this pattern. But there were 1,200 stores and a handful of district managers. We could not get to all of them in time. That is what we set out to fix.
Every multi-location business has a version of this.
- In hotels, it shows up in labor scheduling that stops tracking occupancy.
- In housekeeping productivity that drifts on slow days.
- In energy costs that nobody notices creeping up because the revenue line still looks acceptable.
The pattern is the same.
The best operators already know to look for it.
The question is whether that knowledge reaches every property, or stays locked in the head of the one person who has 20 years of experience and cannot be everywhere at once.
Where the real opportunity sits
The hospitality executive I spoke with redirected me clearly.
The opportunity is not with the brands.
It is with management companies.
- Aimbridge
- Highgate
- HEI
- Davidson
- Pyramid
- HHMG
- Crescent
Companies that manage portfolios of 50 to 500 properties and are compensated on results.
Their financial model requires them to find and close operational gaps.
Management companies are driven by the bottom line. That is their entire business. If you can show them operational efficiencies and improvements, I think they would be very interested.
These companies already have the relationships.
They have PMS revenue data for every property in their portfolio.
Many of their properties use standard bookkeeping tools where cost data is already accessible with a few clicks.
What they do not have is a system for running a consistent, expert-level operational investigation across every property, every month.
Their best operators could do it for a handful of properties. They cannot do it for 200 locations.
That is the exact shape of the problem we solve
The franchise operational intelligence use case and the hotel management company use case are structurally the same:
Distributed locations, variable operator skill, existing data, no consistent mechanism for pushing best-practice investigation out to every property automatically.
When you can run a consistent operational performance review across an entire portfolio and surface the three properties that are trending into trouble before the P and L confirms it, the question stops being whether the tool is useful and becomes whether the management company can afford not to have it.
What this means going forward
The hospitality market is not underserved because the technology did not exist.
It is underserved because the incentive structures pushed the industry toward revenue optimization and left the cost and operational side largely unaddressed.
Brands cannot fix that.
They are not built to.
Individual franchisees cannot fix it.
They do not have the resources or the expertise to run a rigorous investigation on their own operations every week.
What can fix it is an agentic BI layer that encodes expert operational knowledge and runs it autonomously across every property in a portfolio.
Not a dashboard. Not a report template.
An investigation that runs on Monday morning whether or not anyone remembered to ask for it.
"Think of it as putting a mini version of your best operator in a box, scanning every property every week on their behalf. The expertise does not get lost when they are traveling or focused elsewhere. It just runs." - Brad Peters
