Hotel Chains Do Not Improve by Copying One Another

During an operational review, three hotels under the same brand came together. They shared manuals, reporting structures, quality criteria and a large proportion of their suppliers. One operated with short-stay urban demand, another depended on groups and events, and the third was a resort operation shaped by families, peak periods and strong seasonality. When we compared their procedures, we discovered something paradoxical: the more we tried to make them identical, the harder it became to explain why they achieved such different results.

Consistency is a legitimate aspiration for any hotel chain. Guests need to recognise a promise, each property needs comparable controls, and central teams must be able to understand what is happening at every hotel without having to learn a new language every Monday. Yet this need for coherence can easily become an obsession with uniformity. We then begin to measure discipline by the degree of similarity between hotels, even when that similarity does not deliver better service, greater productivity or stronger margins.

Copying a procedure creates an immediate sense of progress. The document already exists, has been approved and apparently worked elsewhere. Implementing it seems faster than rethinking the problem. I have taken part in enough openings, integrations and process reviews to understand the temptation. I have also seen the subsequent cost: accumulating exceptions, teams complying ceremonially, local managers creating parallel solutions, and guests receiving an experience designed for a context other than the one they are actually experiencing.

Over time, I have learned that a strong brand does not require every hotel to perform the same choreography. It requires them to protect the same commitments. Guests must find safety, cleanliness, clarity, professionalism and consistency with the commercial proposition, but the way those outcomes are delivered may vary. An arrival at a 500-room resort should not necessarily be organised in the same way as the front desk at a small urban hotel. Expecting it to be may look very good in the manual and considerably worse at six in the evening.

To avoid this confusion, I use an approach I call the Rules, Criteria and Freedoms Map. Its purpose is simple: to separate what every hotel must comply with, what every hotel must decide using a common criterion, and what each property can adapt. This distinction makes it possible to build hotel chain governance that can combine control and context, leverage economies of scale and, at the same time, preserve the operational intelligence of each hotel.

Uniformity creates visual order and operational disorder

The main mistake arises when an organisation confuses four concepts that should remain separate: brand promise, expected outcome, control standard and work procedure. They may be related, but they are not equivalent. The promise explains what guests should perceive; the outcome defines what we must achieve; the control verifies that we do not deviate; and the procedure describes one specific way of getting there.

When we blur these layers, a method that began as a solution ends up acquiring the status of a corporate principle. We stop asking whether it still works and start defending it because it is documented. The procedure thus becomes a small institution. It has owners, forms, audits and, sometimes, even a presentation with more slides than demonstrable results.

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I remember a room preparation process implemented across several properties because it had improved productivity in one of them. The originating hotel had homogeneous floors, relatively stable occupancy, well-positioned service lifts and a predictable checkout pattern. When it was transferred to another asset with separate buildings, different room types, long walking distances and a high concentration of early arrivals, performance deteriorated. The initial response was to demand greater discipline from the team. The real problem, however, was that we had copied the method without copying the conditions that made it effective.

This type of mistake appears in virtually every area of hotel management under a brand. A breakfast model may work in a corporate hotel where demand is spread from early morning and fail in a resort property where hundreds of guests arrive at the buffet within a very narrow window. A centralised purchasing policy may reduce prices and increase operating costs if pack sizes, delivery frequencies or minimum order quantities do not fit each hotel’s storage capacity. As I have argued when analysing why supplier proximity alone does not guarantee a profitable decision, any purchasing criterion needs to incorporate the full context of use.

The same happens in hotel revenue management. A shared commercial strategy can bring intelligence, pricing discipline and negotiating power, but two hotels under the same brand do not necessarily compete for the same demand or carry the same operational complexity. Additional occupancy can generate an excellent contribution in one hotel and cause costs, congestion or displacement of more profitable business in another. Comparing only ADR, occupancy or RevPAR without interpreting the economic model of each asset creates a false sense of precision.

Copying fails because it travels without context

An operating practice is never made up solely of the steps that appear in the procedure. Behind it are assumptions about the building, the guest, available talent, schedules, regulation, suppliers, demand intensity and value proposition. When we transfer the practice without making those assumptions visible, we copy its observable component and leave behind the mechanism that actually produced the outcome.

That is why I find it useful to distinguish between replicating a solution and transferring a lesson. Replicating means telling another hotel what it must do. Transferring means explaining what problem was solved, under what conditions, with what resources, through what logic and with what risks. The first option creates apparent speed. The second builds organisational capability.

I have observed five recurring harms when chain hotels receive fixed procedures that have not been tested against their reality:

• Ceremonial compliance. The team completes forms, updates records and reproduces the required sequence, but beneath it maintains an informal operation it considers more useful. The organisation believes it has a common standard when it actually has two systems: the official one and the one that enables service to be delivered.

• Permanent exceptions. Deviations are initially authorised as isolated cases, yet they soon become the usual way of operating. If an exception appears every week, it is no longer an exception. It is information about an inadequate design that no one has dared to review.

• Loss of local accountability. When every answer comes from outside, the team learns to execute instructions rather than interpret problems. We are then surprised when initiative is lacking. In reality, we have trained procedural obedience and expect professional judgement to emerge spontaneously.

• Misleading comparisons. Two hotels may report the same degree of compliance and deliver very different experiences. They may also use different procedures and achieve equally strong outcomes. Measuring process similarity without observing its effects encourages comfortable but uninformative standardisation.

• Invisible local innovation. Some of the best operational improvements begin as discreet responses to an everyday difficulty. If the system only rewards adherence to the manual, those practices are not documented, assessed or allowed to benefit the rest of the chain.

The financial consequence of this forced uniformity rarely appears under a specific name in the profit and loss statement. I call it the uniformity tax. It consists of the hours spent justifying deviations, non-value-adding tasks, duplicated controls, lost productivity, errors caused by poorly adapted design and local opportunities we fail to seize. Each cost seems small in isolation, but together they can seriously erode hotel profitability.

There is also a cultural tension. Central structures often have a broad view of the business, analytical capability and accumulated experience across different hotels. Local teams know the operation minute by minute. They know where queues form, which supplier fails when the season changes, which room takes longest to prepare, how destination demand behaves and which commercial promise is difficult to sustain. Neither perspective is sufficient on its own.

A mature organisation avoids romanticising either side. Central teams are not always disconnected from the operation, and the hotel is not always right simply because it is closer to the guest. Proximity provides information, but it can also normalise inefficiencies. Distance provides perspective, though it can oversimplify. The quality of chain hotel operations depends on building a conversation in which local experience can challenge the method and shared knowledge can challenge habit.

Consistency should be measured through protected outcomes

If we want to reduce automatic copying, we need to change the question. Rather than asking whether all hotels follow the same process, we should ask whether all of them protect the outcomes the organisation considers essential. The change may seem semantic, but it completely alters the way we govern.

In the hotel guest experience, for example, we can require that a request be recorded, assigned an owner, followed up and closed within a timeframe appropriate to its urgency. Those elements should be common. The tool used, the department coordinating certain cases or the exact allocation of responsibilities may vary according to the hotel’s size and structure.

In food safety, data protection, financial controls, risk prevention or regulatory compliance, freedom will necessarily be more limited. In organising the briefing, daily room allocation, the sequence for replenishing the buffet or the way destination recommendations are communicated, there may be more room for adaptation. The mistake is to govern both categories with the same rigidity.

Indicators also require caution. A group can establish common definitions to compare hotels, but it must avoid allowing a uniform metric to create harmful behaviours. The analysis of how KPIs can drive teams to protect the metric at the expense of the hotel as a whole is especially relevant in multi-property organisations, because comparative pressure amplifies that risk.

When a hotel knows it will be ranked against others, it may be tempted to optimise what is visible. It may reduce average check-in time by avoiding useful conversations, improve Housekeeping productivity by deferring minor defects, or protect food cost through excessively conservative replenishment. The figure improves and the experience weakens. Standardising the indicator has created a behavioural deviation that no manual will acknowledge as its own.

That is why I recommend comparing three dimensions at the same time: outcome, context and collateral damage. The outcome explains what was achieved; context helps interpret the difficulty and resources used; collateral damage shows whether the improvement was achieved by shifting the problem to another department, the guest or the future. Without these three perspectives, comparisons between hotels risk rewarding incomplete solutions.

A mature chain governs rules, criteria and freedoms

The Rules, Criteria and Freedoms Map starts from a practical idea: every relevant decision must have an explicit degree of autonomy. Ambiguity is costly. If the hotel does not know what it can adapt, it will seek approval for minor matters or act independently without informing anyone. If the centre does not know what it has delegated, it will intervene inconsistently and review decisions after they have already been implemented.

The map avoids this confusion through three layers that should be documented in language that is understandable to those working in the operation:

• Non-negotiable rules. These protect legal obligations, safety, financial integrity, guest rights, essential brand commitments and risks whose materialisation could affect the whole group. They should be few, clear and auditable. Each rule needs to explain what it protects, who is accountable for it and what happens in the event of a deviation. If everything is declared non-negotiable, the concept loses meaning and the organisation ends up negotiating everything privately.

• Shared criteria. These guide decisions that require adaptation. They do not prescribe a single sequence, but establish objectives, priorities, limits and evidence. A common criterion could require that any change in cleaning frequency assess savings, guest perception, team workload, environmental impact and positioning. Each hotel may design a different solution, although all must justify it using the same logic.

• Operational freedoms. These define the space in which the hotel can decide without seeking prior approval. Freedom should include limits, available resources, monitoring metrics and an obligation to share learning. It does not mean leaving each property to fend for itself. It is protected autonomy that enables teams to act quickly and take responsibility for the outcome.

This architecture is more demanding than publishing a single procedure. It requires explaining the reasoning behind every decision and recognising that some corporate practices are preferences, not principles. It also requires hotels to support their adaptations with evidence, preventing autonomy from becoming an excuse to retain inefficient habits.

In my experience, the map works best when it is built around specific decisions rather than entire departments. Saying that Purchasing is centralised or that Operations is local provides little clarity. Within Purchasing, it may be sensible to centralise negotiations for strategic categories, share minimum specifications and allow local decisions on suppliers for urgent-response needs. Within Operations, there may be a common rule on room inspection, a shared criterion on cleaning priorities and freedom to organise routes according to the building.

What should be centralised and what should remain close to the hotel

There is no universal formula, although I have found questions that help assign each decision to the right level. Centralisation adds value when it increases negotiating power, reduces risk, creates specialist knowledge, ensures comparability or protects a cross-cutting promise. Local decision-making is usually superior when it depends on changing information, requires speed, is shaped by the asset or affects interactions that require contextual sensitivity.

Before centralising an activity, it is worth assessing the following aspects:

• Severity of incorrect execution. The greater the legal, financial, human or reputational risk, the more necessary it is to establish common rules, independent controls and unambiguous accountabilities.

• Variability between hotels. If demand, the building, services, staffing or regulation differ significantly, an identical procedure is more likely to create friction. Variability does not prevent the sharing of criteria, but it does suggest leaving flexibility in the method.

• Value of scale. Some decisions clearly improve when they are grouped, especially in negotiation, specialist training, analysis, quality assurance or procurement of shared resources. Even so, the economy achieved must be compared with the adaptation cost transferred to each hotel.

• Need for speed. A decision affecting the guest currently in the hotel cannot move through an approval chain designed for a budget review. Governance must take account of the operational clock and grant autonomy where waiting is also a decision.

• Availability of local knowledge. If the quality of the response depends on information that changes every day, the person closest to the problem must play a meaningful role. This does not prevent oversight; it requires controls designed not to destroy the value of that proximity.

• Reversibility. Decisions that are easy to correct can tolerate greater local experimentation. Those that are difficult to reverse, especially those related to investment, contracts, safety or positioning, require broader assessment.

Applying these questions helps move beyond overly simple debates between centralisation and decentralisation. The right decision may be to centralise definition, decentralise execution and share evaluation. It may also involve allowing local pilots before turning a practice into a recommendation for other hotels. The most useful organisational architecture is rarely found at the extremes.

Hotel marketing provides a good example. The brand needs to protect its identity, tone, attributes and verifiable commitments. However, local demand, the relationship with the destination, event calendars and search behaviours may require specific actions. An impeccable central campaign may be irrelevant to a particular market, while a highly effective local initiative may weaken the brand if it promises something the hotel cannot deliver. The shared criterion must connect creativity, positioning, operational capacity and financial contribution.

The same logic applies to talent. There may be a common framework for competencies, values and assessment, but shift organisation, multi-skilled profiles and training needs depend on the complexity of each operation. Imposing ratios without interpreting services, distances, peak periods and the degree of outsourcing produces poor comparisons. A hotel does not have excess staffing simply because it uses more hours than another; it may be protecting a different promise or offsetting a structural limitation of the building.

Transferring a practice requires more than sending the procedure

A chain truly learns when it turns local successes into transferable knowledge. To achieve this, the practice must travel with its context. I use a transfer sheet that requires several questions to be answered before adoption is recommended:

• What problem it solved. The description must include the initial situation, its frequency, the departments affected and the operational or experiential cost that justified intervention.

• Why it worked. It is important to identify the causal mechanism, rather than limit ourselves to the result. If times were reduced, we need to know whether this was achieved by removing steps, changing priorities, improving information, redistributing work or reducing variability.

• What conditions it required. This should include resources, building characteristics, occupancy level, team capabilities, demand behaviour and any dependency that may not exist in another hotel.

• What cost it introduced. Every improvement consumes something: implementation time, training, investment, supervision or complexity. If the cost remains hidden, the practice will appear more attractive than it really is.

• What risks it created. A local solution may shift work, reduce flexibility or worsen another part of the experience. Identifying these effects prevents a partial success from being exported as though it were a complete solution.

• How it should be tested. Transfer requires a trial period, metrics, owners, safety limits and a rule for stopping or adapting the pilot. Immediate copying across the entire chain multiplies both successes and errors.

This approach is linked to the principle of learning before scaling. Lean thinking applied to Hospitality provides valuable discipline here: observe the real work, identify what creates value and reduce what adds effort without improving the outcome. Standardisation makes sense when it captures the best known way of working under specific conditions and remains open to review.

A living standard does not change on a whim, but neither is it protected out of pride. If a local practice achieves better outcomes, it must be able to challenge the common method. In turn, the hotel proposing the change must demonstrate it with evidence and accept that its solution may not be transferable. This reciprocity creates a healthier learning culture than the usual conflict between those who defend the manual and those who invoke the property’s uniqueness in order to change nothing.

There is an important connection here with professional rigour. Autonomy only works when competence, clarity and accountability exist. Giving a hotel freedom without defining outcomes, limits or responsibilities is an elegant form of abandonment. Imposing procedures to prevent every possible error does not guarantee excellence either. As I have analysed when addressing the effects of rigour turned into rigidity, excessive control can end up weakening the initiative we need to solve real problems.

Indicators for governance that learns

Governance across multiple hotels needs metrics, but it should not be limited to compliance audits. I recommend building a dashboard that shows whether the organisation is creating useful consistency or merely documentary similarity.

• Dispersion in essential outcomes. This makes it possible to observe how much quality, safety, productivity, margin and guest experience vary between hotels. Dispersion must be interpreted alongside context, but it helps identify where there is a difference worth explaining.

• Justified local deviations. It is useful to separate non-compliance from authorised adaptations. A well-supported deviation may be a sign of maturity; a hidden deviation reveals a lack of trust or an overly rigid system.

• Recurrence of exceptions. This measures how often the same rule needs to be excepted. High recurrence indicates that the standard, the hotel design or the available resources need to be reviewed.

• Actual implementation time. It is not enough to measure when a change was communicated. We need to know when it began to produce the expected outcome without extraordinary support. The difference reveals the true difficulty of turning a procedure into operational capability.

• Local practices adopted by other hotels. This indicator shows whether learning flows in both directions. A chain in which every idea originates at the centre may be failing to leverage a large part of its knowledge.

• Standard friction cost. This captures additional hours, duplication, delays, approvals and compensatory tasks caused by poorly adapted procedures. It will not always be possible to express it with absolute precision, but making it visible changes the quality of the conversation.

It is also useful to review positive differences. When one hotel achieves better results than the others, the question should not only be what it does differently, but which part of that difference can be explained, taught and replicated. Sometimes we will find a transferable practice. On other occasions, we will discover an advantage of location, asset, talent or demand that it would be unwise to turn into a standard.

Hotel strategic planning gains depth when it incorporates these distinctions. Budgets are no longer built through replicated percentages, objectives can reflect the potential and constraints of each asset, and investments are prioritised according to the obstacles preventing the common outcome from being delivered. The hotel ceases to be a box within a portfolio and once again becomes an economic, operational and human unit that needs its own strategy within a shared framework.

A ninety-day implementation plan

Transforming the governance of an entire chain may seem like an enormous task. I prefer to begin with one family of decisions already generating tension, exceptions or uneven outcomes. This could be room preparation, purchasing policy, management of guest courtesies, breakfast, temporary recruitment or the incident-handling process.

1. Select a process with visible friction. Gather examples of deviations, lost time, complaints, costs and local solutions. Avoid starting with the most prestigious process; begin with one that allows learning without compromising critical risks.

2. Describe the outcome that must be protected. Define what the guest expects, what the operation needs, what financial limit must be respected and which risks are unacceptable. This definition will make it possible to assess different methods without losing coherence.

3. Classify its decisions. Place each element within the Rules, Criteria and Freedoms Map. Where there is disagreement, ask each party to explain which risk it is trying to avoid. Many procedural discussions conceal legitimate concerns that have never been expressed clearly.

4. Compare the real operation between hotels. Observe how work is done, not only what the documents state. Identify asset, demand, team and organisational conditions that explain the differences. An operational visit usually teaches far more than exchanging files.

5. Design controlled pilots. Allow one or two hotels to adapt the method within clear limits. Measure outcome, context and collateral damage. Include the views of those who execute the process and of the departments that receive its consequences.

6. Turn learning into governance. Update the rules, redefine the criteria and expand or reduce freedoms according to the evidence. Document why the decision has been made so that the standard retains memory and does not become an instruction without context once again.

7. Review after a full operating cycle. Some effects only emerge with seasonal changes, occupancy variations or staff turnover. A practice that works during quiet weeks may fail when confronted with the pressure it was supposedly designed to handle.

If you manage hotels under the same brand, I suggest reviewing how many of your standards describe an outcome and how many merely impose a sequence. Wherever the procedure has taken the place of purpose, ask what risk it protects, what evidence demonstrates its usefulness and what conditions it needs to work. That conversation usually uncovers more opportunities than another round of audits.

The most valuable consistency does not consist of making every hotel look alike, but of ensuring that all are reliable, understandable and consistent with the promise they share. A guest can recognise a brand without breakfast, arrival or the relationship with the destination being delivered in exactly the same way. In fact, a brand gains credibility when it demonstrates that it knows how to adapt without ceasing to be itself.

I would start with one specific decision, listen to those who carry it out and map its rules, criteria and freedoms on a single page. If the map cannot fit into a clear conversation, governance is probably still too complex. Good chain hotel management does not produce obedient copies; it builds properties capable of learning, deciding and being accountable for their results.