#320: Hotel P&L Benchmarking & The Impact of the World Cup | with Jan Freitag & Amanda Hite — The Modern Hotelier

In this special episode, David Millili sits down with industry leaders at the Hotel Data Conference in Nashville to explore the latest trends shaping hotel profitability, benchmarking, revenue management, and mega-event performance.

First, Amanda Hite, President of STR, shares how new P&L benchmarking capabilities within CoStar with STR Benchmark are helping hotel owners, operators, management companies, and asset managers better understand more than 100 revenue and expense line items. She discusses profit flow analysis, rising undistributed expenses, declining margins, asset profitability, and how AI-powered tools could help hoteliers identify the data that matters most for improving revenue and profitability.

Then, Jan Freitag of CoStar breaks down the hotel revenue impact of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and explains why its impact was closer to 30 Super Bowls rather than the 104 suggested by FIFA's president. He explores ADR growth, occupancy trends, international versus local demand, match-day pricing, minimum-stay restrictions, and the lessons hotel revenue leaders can apply to future mega-events, including the Olympics.

In this episode, you'll learn:

How P&L benchmarking can reveal opportunities to improve hotel profitability
Why rising undistributed expenses are putting pressure on hotel margins
What Could AI and Natural-Language Analytics Mean for the Future of Hotel Decision-Making?
Why Did the World Cup’s Hotel Impact Differ from the Super Bowl?

Watch the FULL EPISODE on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oepa3lq-EdU

Links:
Jan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janfreitag/
Amanda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandawattshite/
CoStar Group: https://www.costargroup.com/

For full show notes head to: https://themodernhotelier.com/episode/320

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Connect with Steve and David:
Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/%F0%9F%8E...
David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-mil.