Sincerely, BLLA
At the 2026 Boutique Hotel Owners Conference, three independent owners and a revenue strategist took the industry's pulse: tightening margins, the ca...
November 10, 2026 – 12 min read
At the 2026 Boutique Hotel Owners Conference, three independent owners and a revenue strategist took the industry’s pulse: tightening margins, the case against chasing occupancy, and what it takes to keep good people.
Alison Weinberg-Fahey, a shareholder at Greenberg Traurig, opened with a pulse check. If each panelist had to name the single biggest pressure on their business right now, what would it be?
The answers came quickly and sounded alike. “If I had to put it in one word, it’s just profitability,” said Maya Mallick, owner and creative director of The Culver Hotel. Leo Grifka, founder and CEO of Grifka Group, chose two: “margin compression.” Jayson Seidman, founder and managing partner of Sandstone, named labor first among many challenges. Hovig Khatcherian, North America market strategy lead at PricePoint, who estimated he has met with roughly a thousand hoteliers in recent years, described the same squeeze from the outside.
Mallick acknowledged the tension with this year’s theme. “This question is a tough one because it takes the wonder out of things,” she said. “There are realities that we have to deal with.” What followed was a frank conversation about those realities, and about the very different ways independent owners are answering them.
The pressures are familiar, and they are compounding. Labor, insurance, housekeeping, maintenance, and capital expenditures are all rising. “Hotels have historically been very profitable,” Mallick said, “and in the last few years, it’s getting increasingly difficult.”
Boutique owners carry an extra burden: their buildings. “A lot of our boutique hotels are in older properties,” Mallick said. “Often there are just these unpredictable costs that come up that we have to deal with immediately, that we can’t really plan out.” Her advice was to stay close to the numbers. Owners and entrepreneurs, she noted, have the advantage of being deeply connected to their own businesses.
Grifka pointed to costs no operator controls, such as Los Angeles’s minimum wage ordinance and insurance premiums. The work, he said, is “figuring out efficiencies in other areas where we can positively affect the margin.”
Khatcherian framed it as a squeeze from both directions. Costs keep climbing, but guests remain price sensitive. The question for owners is how to move fast enough to raise or lower rates as demand shifts, and stay profitable in the process.
Seidman added the human side. His priority is retaining employees, giving them, in his words, “a meaning to show up to work,” and being able to pay them accordingly.
Most independent hotels have no dedicated revenue management team. Weinberg-Fahey asked how owners can avoid leaving money on the table when demand can change overnight. The answers revealed the liveliest disagreement of the session.
Khatcherian offered two words: velocity and precision. He urged owners to watch three signals at once:
“Velocity is when you pick up on an opportunity and you don’t miss it,” he said, “and precision is when you capture the right move at the right date for the right guest at the right time.” Since few owners have time to watch all three constantly, he argued, this is where revenue technology earns its place.
Seidman agreed, then disagreed. “We’re here to really stir up the pot,” he said. He described himself as a steward of small, often historic properties that matter to the neighborhoods around them. “I’m a quality over quantity guy,” he said. “I will choose a 50% occupancy rate at double the ADR of the market all day.” Lower occupancy, he noted, also brings lower labor and operating costs.
He does not want to compete on rate. “I want to set the bar so high that all of the other big boys in town are just kind of annoyed that everyone’s staying with me,” he said. That standard, in turn, raises the bar for his team. “I want people to feel like individuals, not numbers,” he said. His solution for anyone who wants a full house: “You sell it out for a private event.”
Seidman saved particular frustration for the comp set, the standard benchmarking tool lenders and investors ask for. His argument: a one-of-a-kind experience has no true comparison. Mallick countered that comp sets are still real, and recommended watching both the city’s event calendar and competitors’ moves. “Staying nimble, being able to respond quickly,” she said, “and really being flexible without losing that integrity.”
Grifka found the middle ground. If an owner’s strategy is half occupancy at double the rate, the comp set simply becomes less relevant. “That’s the beauty of boutique,” he said. “We can all have very different properties and do well with different strategies.” Khatcherian added that the large majority of PricePoint’s independent clients do not price against a comp set at all. Their guests, he said, are looking for something different from what the chains offer.
Weinberg-Fahey turned to a trade-off every owner faces: how far to lean into food and beverage.
Mallick laid out the case plainly. Rooms are the more predictable profit center, with costs that are easier to control. “F&B is where we can very, very quickly lose that margin,” she said. “However, F&B is where all the fun is. That’s where all the experiences are.” It is also how a hotel draws in its local community.
At The Culver Hotel, events carry the program. “In a strange way, events is really the backbone of our F&B,” she said, giving the hotel the financial footing to run bar and dining, which are not always as profitable. Events also work as marketing. Many attendees are visiting for the first time, and many come back. “When we have our events, we have to be excellent,” she tells her team. “This is our opportunity to shine.”
The costs are real. Food and beverage is where most turnover, training, and consistency problems live. She called it a strategic investment in the overall experience more than a reliable profit line.
Weinberg-Fahey introduced Seidman’s view of events as a 24- to 48-month crystal ball of cash, and he explained the idea. “Every hotel is living in the future,” he said. “We’re using revenue from the future to exist in the present.”
That model depends on the neighbors. Many of his properties sit in residential areas, and after his staff, he said, the neighbors come first. He invites them to his parties and gives them VIP treatment. In return, they become allies rather than complainants, and he can lean hard into events.
The pricing logic is scarcity. “What we have is one of a kind,” he said. He recalled telling his sales team to test higher pricing. “Charge double. Let’s see how they flinch. Nobody flinches.” Food and beverage stays fully in-house, because an exceptional daily dining program is what sells the weddings and birthdays. At one small property, an old mansion of roughly 20 rooms with an ordinary kitchen, revenue has grown several times over since he bought it, almost entirely through events.
He also previewed where he sees the model heading: an inclusive rate that removes the nickel-and-diming entirely. Guests pay one price and indulge, with no one asking about the minibar. “That’s the ultimate,” he said. Mallick agreed: “That’s the ultimate guest experience.”
Mallick stressed that not every property can run a full operation, and offered alternatives:
Grifka offered a reality check. At Palihotel Culver City, the restaurant Simonette is a success, sometimes at the rooms’ expense. At 11 p.m. on a Saturday, a busy courtyard means calls to the front desk about noise. The team moves diners indoors behind a glass sliding door, even though staying open later would earn the restaurant more. “It’s kind of a give and take,” he said, “and it’s completely property dependent.”
Mallick added a leadership note. Food and beverage and catering teams often act like separate departments. She tells hers that events are “the golden child,” and makes sure the rooms and food and beverage teams work closely, because the programming serves hotel guests and the local community at once. “We as owners understand how it all connects,” she said, “but the team doesn’t always understand.”
Grifka raised a problem specific to small properties: regulations that apply by key count. Los Angeles’s hotel minimum wage ordinance applies to properties with 60 or more rooms. A 59-room hotel is exempt. A 60-room hotel is treated the same as a 500-room one, without the economies of scale.
“That’s a really tough question,” Grifka said, when asked how small independents make themselves heard. His answer was strength in numbers. A single boutique hotel has little leverage with a city council. Together, through organizations like BLLA, independents can make the case collectively. “When you add it all together,” he said, “there’s some power in numbers.”
Holding on to talent has been harder since the pandemic. Each owner described a different lever.
For Seidman, the answer is growth. “I’m a hospitality guy now,” he said. “I’m no longer just the hotel guy.” Having built a strong culinary team at one property, he opened standalone restaurants, bars, and event spaces in New Orleans that have nothing to do with guest rooms, in part to give that costly, talented team more to be excited about.
The energy has become a recruiting tool. He described hiring people away from the Four Seasons, already trained to an exceptional standard, who wanted something they weren’t getting there. “They want a voice, they want an identity, they want to feel like a human,” he said. His advice to owners was to look for concepts and pop-ups in their own cities that could give their teams room to grow.
Mallick focused on the relationship. “People want to work for good people,” she said. She stressed integrity, respect, being a good role model, and flexibility for the lives employees have outside work: families, schedules, appointments. “People want to feel safe, they want to feel recognized, they want to feel appreciated,” she said. Competitive pay and benefits matter, but they are only part of it.
Some of The Culver Hotel’s key team members have been there for two decades. Mallick added a caveat: longevity alone is not the goal. “You need to have people that are open to change,” she said. The best teams are willing to step into discomfort alongside their owners and take on the next thing together.
Grifka’s lever was trust. His teams are empowered to resolve a guest’s complaint at the front desk without escalating to management. “That autonomy makes their job more interesting,” he said. “And when they do a good job, they feel good about it, and they want to come back to work.”
Asked for a final takeaway, each panelist offered one line.
“Quality over quantity,” Seidman said. “I keep finding myself on repeat when I talk to my team.”
Grifka urged owners to dive in. “I have two hotels and I don’t know exactly what I’m doing,” he said. “You learn as you go along.”
Mallick’s was to keep moving. “Just don’t stay stagnant,” she said. “You’ll look back in a few years and be like, ‘Wow, I did all that.'”
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