Behind the Stays

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This Week’s Guest:

Gabriel Perez - Chief Operating Officer, Hotels, The Indigo Road Hospitality Group
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thehotelier

 

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

 

 

Gabriel Perez, COO of Hotels at The Indigo Road Hospitality Group, makes the case that food and beverage should be a profit center, not an obligatory amenity, and Indigo Road targets double-digit profitability in every outlet. His first rule for developers: bring the F&B operator in from day one, before kitchens, hoods and life-safety systems are designed, or it's fatal "11 out of 10 times." He explains why Indigo Road prefers operating both the hotel and its restaurants, since a split operation fractures the guest experience, and Zach shares a New York stay where he couldn't charge dinner to his room. Gabriel says long-term success comes down to culture: hiring good humans over great résumés, a director of culture who regularly visits every property, and career paths that move waiters into marketing, accounting and purchasing. He talks about choosing operators who balance creativity with financials, giving concepts time to earn community trust, and the Indigo Road "groupies" who follow the brand from restaurants to hotels. He also explains why comfortable classics done well often beat trends. With co-host Ben (Onera), who is adding F&B for the first time, the conversation stays practical.

Key takeaways: Treat F&B as a profit center; Indigo Road won't accept break-even outlets. Involve the F&B operator from the very start of design and development. Operating hotel and restaurant together keeps the guest experience cohesive. Culture is maintained deliberately: selective hiring, a director of culture and visible career paths. Creativity and profitability align when chefs and GMs understand the P&L.

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Modbeans Coffee
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This Week’s Guest: Kerri Gibson, Co-Founder, Chalets Hygge & Motel-Boutique Hygge
Explore Chalets Hygge: https://www.chaletshygge.com/
Explore Motel-Boutique Hygge: https://www.motelboutiquehygge.com/en/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chalets_hygge/ and https://www.instagram.com/motelboutiquehygge/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerri-gibson-cpa

Your Host: Zach Busekrus - Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

A night in one of Kerri Gibson’s chalets leaves her about $180 in margin. A night in one of her motel rooms leaves $50 or $60. The motel is still on track to out-earn the chalets, because volume makes up the difference.

Kerri is back on Behind the Stays, and she’s the kind of guest I love most: someone who started in a completely different world. She’s a CPA who spent 22 years in tax and accounting software, from an early-stage startup to running the U.S. small professional division of a multibillion-dollar Dutch company, then resigned with no idea what came next. A run-down house in Quebec ski country was supposed to be a renovation project. She couldn’t bring herself to sell it, so it became a short-term rental. It was the first of the seven chalets that now make up Chalets Hygge, which she runs with her partner, Philippe, in Orford. When short-term rentals stopped penciling, they underwrote more than 20 motels. They bought a tired 17-room roadside motel in Baie-Saint-Paul that was still running like it was 1998, and today it’s Motel-Boutique Hygge.

We get into how Kerri knows it’s time to grow, and her clearest signal is boredom. She explains why she brought the motel under the Hygge brand but kept the old name in its tagline, so the European guests who fill most of high season can still find it. She also breaks down how the guests differ. Chalet guests plan everything weeks out. Motel guests tune in on arrival day, stay 1.4 nights on average, and expect someone on site to help plan their stay. We also talk about:

why Google reviews drive the motel while social media drives the chalets

why she’s leaning into micro-influencers and scaling back paid ads

how she’s thinking about showing up in AI search

how her direct-booking mix compares across the two businesses

Plus: her value-first newsletter and 10% returning-guest discount, the exercise that helped her separate her skills from her job description, why Lodgify sits at the center of her tech stack, and the best compliment the motel has gotten so far, courtesy of a Swiss guest whose idea of a motel came from American movies.

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Is the line between a hotel and a vacation rental finally gone? Zach Busekrus and Ben Wolff think the stays category is collapsing into one, and the big brands are waking up to it.

This week it's just the two of them, together in person at the Oasi office in Austin, while Edwin and Scott are traveling. They open with big news: Zach is joining Oasi, a revenue growth firm for hotels, as chief growth officer.

Then the headlines. Marriott's gross fees jumped 14% to $1.52 billion in the third quarter, driven by the co-branded credit card business, while a group of owners asked for a bigger share of loyalty income. Zach and Ben talk through what that means for owners and for the brand. Booking.com is leaning into AI, and they ask whether consumers really care about the payments layer and what AI assistants could do to direct booking. They also get into revenue management, and why dynamic pricing tools need watching instead of a set-and-forget approach.

From there it's hotels versus short-term rentals, with points and loyalty at the center. Hilton's move to let guests pay a bar tab with points raises the question of who wins. Zach makes the case that regulation and permitting need to catch up with how people actually book stays. They close with local retailers, towns and hospitality businesses working together on new local offerings.

A short pod this week. The full crew is back next week.

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

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Modbeans Coffee
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This Week’s Guest:

Jeff Iloulian, Founder & CEO, HostGPO
Website: https://hostgpo.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-iloulian-bb0b6829

 

Your Host:

Zach Busekrus - Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

 

What does the stuff inside a vacation rental tell you about where the industry is headed?

Jeff Iloulian is back on Behind the Stays. Before launching HostGPO, Jeff left a career in law and built a property management portfolio of about 150 homes in Southern California. The two questions he kept running into - what should I actually buy, and how do I get it for less - became the foundation for HostGPO, the members-only buying group for vacation rental and boutique hospitality operators that just won Supplier of the Year at VRMA.

In this episode, Jeff shares what he can see from his seat: why operators are done replacing the same cheap coffee table every year, why standardizing linens and furniture has become a brand decision, and how granular market data - down to how many homes within five miles of you have a sauna - is deciding what gets built.

We also get into the mood at VRMA, where private equity and consolidation dominated the conversation, and why Jeff reads it as excitement with a proceed-with-caution asterisk. Plus: the amenity wars, why a five-star sheet on Amazon is not a hospitality-grade sheet, new partners from Lowe's to Schlage, and why he'd rather stay in his lane than chase more of your wallet.

And then there's AI. HostGPO members are already connecting their AI agents to do the buying. If you've wondered what the AI discovery era means for how this industry spends money, Jeff has a concrete answer.

Modbeans Coffee
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This Week’s Guest:

 Jenn Parks, Vice President of Development, North America, WorldHotels (part of BWH Hotels)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferfigariparks/
Explore WorldHotels:
https://www.worldhotels.com/en-us

 

Your Host:

Zach Busekrus
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

 

Zach talks with Jenn Parks, Vice President of Development for North America at WorldHotels (part of BWH Hotels), about where independent hotel development is heading. Recorded live at the Independent Hotel Show in Miami, Jenn names two big growth areas: branded residences, including WorldHotels' first in Vietnam, and elevated outdoor hospitality through the new WorldHotels Backdrop brand, including Zion Wildflower Resort and a property in Asheville. She explains why owners pick WorldHotels over soft brands like Autograph or Curio: flexibility with no stringent brand standards, shorter agreements and lower fees, a brand-storytelling workshop at onboarding, and the commercial power of BWH's roughly 70-million-member loyalty program. Jenn also highlights an underrated benefit: the community of independent hoteliers who swap best practices at an annual conference. On demand, she sees residences leading in APAC and the Middle East, and true boutique, outdoor and lifestyle resort product leading in North America. Many owners she meets are leaving a big brand and are wary of going fully independent. And her hot take: curated, place-specific retail is an underused part of the hotel experience. It's why she still thinks about a Grand Cayman resort every time she puts on a shirt she bought there.