On this episode of Suite Success, host Katie Cline sits down with Peer Bueller, the new CEO of Kayak, about succeeding co-founder Steve Hafner and defining Kayak’s next era.

Peer shares what has surprised him most about stepping into the top job, why he’s more involved in the nitty-gritty of the business than he ever expected, and the leadership and productivity philosophies that have shaped his career. He also explains why he still manages his own calendar and books his own travel, how he gets more done by working at the right time rather than simply working more hours, and why he believes you can give 110% at work while still being the parent or partner you want to be.

Katie and Peer also dig into what AI will—and won’t—change about the way we travel. Peer shares where he believes conversational AI can make planning dramatically better, why traditional side-by-side comparison still matters, and how KAYAK is thinking about earning consumer trust as the way we search for and book travel evolves.

Plus, they discuss KAYAK’s bet on corporate travel, why Peer never had a decades-long plan to become CEO, what getting into rooms with other top executives taught him about reaching the top, and the discipline it takes to walk away from work when the work is never actually done.

A hotel rarely underperforms for one reason. The visible symptom may be low occupancy, weak RevPAR, declining room revenue or poor GOP, but the underlying cause can sit somewhere completely different. A hotel with 60% occupancy may have a demand problem, but it may also have a pricing problem, poor market positioning, weak sales production, excessive OTA dependence, inadequate distribution, poor reputation, product deficiencies or simply ineffective commercial execution. The first responsibility of a Commercial Manager or asset manager is therefore not to immediately change rates or demand more sales activity; it is to diagnose the performance gap before prescribing the solution. The starting point should always be the market. Establish the hotel's competitive supply, market occupancy, ADR and RevPAR, then compare the property against its competitive set using MPI, ARI and RGI. If the market is at 78% occupancy and the hotel is at 62%, there is a clear share problem. If the entire market is at 62%, the issue may be broader demand conditions. Equally, if the hotel has 70% occupancy but ADR is materially below the competitive set, the property may be buying occupancy at the expense of rate. The diagnosis therefore begins with separating market-driven underperformance from hotel-controlled underperformance. This distinction is fundamental because management should not attempt to solve a market problem with unnecessary discounting or attempt to solve a hotel execution problem by blaming the market.

The second step is to decompose the performance gap into occupancy, rate and demand-source components. Occupancy is an output, not a strategy. Management needs to understand why the rooms are empty. Start with the booking curve and pickup: is the hotel receiving insufficient demand, receiving demand too late, or receiving demand but converting poorly? Then analyse the segment mix — corporate, government, leisure, groups, wholesale, relocation, insurance, direct and OTA — and identify where production has changed. A hotel can lose significant market share because one major corporate account moved, a government contract expired, a relocation provider changed supplier, a wholesaler reduced allocation or the sales team simply stopped prospecting. These issues can be invisible in an annual occupancy report. The same applies to ADR. A declining ADR may be caused by deliberate tactical pricing, an unfavourable segment mix, excessive discounting, poor rate fences, weak room-type upselling or an increasing proportion of lower-rated OTA and wholesale business. Therefore, the commercial diagnostic should bridge market performance → segment performance → account production → channel production → booking behaviour. Every material variance should ultimately have a commercial explanation. “Occupancy is down” is not a diagnosis. “Weekday corporate room nights are down 2,400 year-on-year following the loss of three negotiated accounts, while weekend leisure production is stable” is a diagnosis.

The third area is pricing and competitive positioning. A hotel can have strong demand but still underperform because it is positioned incorrectly in the market. Review the hotel's BAR architecture, room-type pricing, promotional rates, corporate discounts, OTA offers and competitor pricing by day. The critical question is whether the hotel's price accurately reflects its product, location, reputation and demand position. If competitors are consistently selling at higher ADR while achieving similar or greater occupancy, the hotel may have pricing power that it is failing to capture. Conversely, if the hotel is priced above its competitive position while producing materially weaker occupancy, the issue may be value perception or product competitiveness rather than sales volume. This is where rate shopping needs to be combined with guest feedback, review scores, room condition, service standards and product positioning. A hotel cannot solve a fundamental product-value problem through revenue management indefinitely. Similarly, it should not discount simply because a competitor is cheaper if its own product has a stronger value proposition. The objective is to identify the hotel's true competitive position and then establish whether the commercial strategy is monetising that position. This is also where displacement becomes important. A hotel can appear to have strong group production while simultaneously losing higher-rated transient demand. Likewise, a hotel can achieve high occupancy while generating weak RevPAR because too much inventory is being allocated to low-rated segments.

The fourth diagnostic layer is sales and distribution effectiveness. Once the market and pricing position have been established, management needs to determine whether the hotel is actually reaching the available demand. Sales should be measured by production rather than activity. A salesperson visiting 30 companies means little if those accounts generate no room nights. The commercial review should examine the top producing accounts, declining accounts, lost accounts, prospect pipeline, conversion rate, negotiated rate production and account concentration. For each major market segment, management should be able to identify the addressable demand, target accounts, current production and pipeline required to close the gap. Distribution needs the same discipline. Analyse direct, OTA, GDS, wholesale and other channels on a net revenue and contribution basis, not simply gross ADR. A $200 OTA booking with a 20% commission is economically different from a $200 direct booking, and a $160 wholesale booking may be valuable during a soft period but destructive during compression. If a hotel is underperforming, ask whether the problem is genuinely insufficient demand or whether the hotel has insufficient access to demand. Weak visibility, poor content, closed inventory, rate-parity issues, booking restrictions, inadequate account connectivity or poor digital conversion can all create an artificial demand problem.

Finally, the diagnosis needs to reach operations and management execution, because commercial performance does not exist independently from the hotel's ability to deliver the product. A hotel may have strong demand but lose revenue because rooms are not released on time, maintenance defects reduce sellable inventory, housekeeping productivity limits room availability, check-in issues damage reviews or service failures suppress repeat and direct demand. Equally, a hotel may have a good commercial strategy but poor execution at property level. This is why the final stage of the diagnostic should connect Revenue → Sales → Operations → Labour → Guest Experience → GOP. Once the root causes are identified, classify each issue into three categories: market-controlled, hotel-controlled and management-controlled.

Market-controlled factors include overall demand, new competitive supply and major external events. Hotel-controlled factors include pricing, segmentation, distribution, sales activity, product standards and labour deployment. Management-controlled factors include decision speed, accountability, meeting cadence, execution and whether agreed actions are actually completed. The output should be a prioritised recovery plan, not a long list of observations. For each problem, establish the revenue opportunity, required action, responsible person, deadline and expected financial impact. The objective is to move from “Why are we under budget?” to “What specifically is causing the $X revenue or GOP gap, what can we control, and what action will recover it?” That is the difference between reporting hotel performance and actually managing the asset.