Episodes

Dustin Baker runs Hidden Gem Media, a performance marketing agency built to pull hospitality brands off the OTAs and onto direct bookings. By his account, one client resort went from roughly thirty thousand dollars a month in direct bookings to somewhere between two and three hundred thousand. His explanation for that jump has almost nothing to do with follower count. In this episode, Michael Russell and Dustin work through the difference between search traffic and discovery traffic, and why a ...

Carly Whitney is a Senior Vice President at Business Finance Capital, a certified development company, and in thirteen years there she has been across more than a thousand SBA transactions. By her own count, that adds up to roughly four billion dollars in sales and refinances, with just over a billion of it in SBA dollars. Her answer to how much a hotel buyer actually has to bring to the table is fifteen percent. In this episode, Michael Russell and Carly break down the SBA 504 program from the...

A 33-key Art Deco hotel in Miami sat on the market for five years. Forty brokers tried to sell it and failed. Amiti Bhow, Vice President at NewGen Advisory, finally got it done, not because she found a higher price, but because she found a buyer with certainty and clean terms. In this episode, Michael Russell talks with Bhow about what actually closed the Marlin, a hotel with a recording history that includes Beyoncé, Pharrell, and Bob Marley, and why the ownership group she calls "hobbyists, n...

Alexander Cartwright is a PhD economist who left a tenured professorship to buy distressed hotels and convert them into workforce housing through his company, HotelSHIFT. His business rests on a simple valuation gap: hotels trade at higher cap rates than apartments because their income is considered less durable, so the same building can be worth dramatically more once it's rezoned and leased as multifamily instead of run as a hotel. If you're looking for a corner of hospitality investing with ...

Dan Daly runs a fund that invests in boutique hotels across Europe, and on this episode he makes the case for why, in his view, Portugal beats the US on nearly every number that matters. According to Dan, property there has appreciated roughly 18% year over year versus 1.8% in the US, and a 30-year mortgage runs about 3.5% against 6.5-7% here. That gap, plus a much lower cost per square foot, is why his fund stopped looking at US deals altogether. Instead of buying property, Global Investment P...

Neil Dipaola bought five wrecked Airstreams off Craigslist in 2012 to use as affordable housing in a Santa Barbara mobile home park. Today those trailers have grown into AutoCamp, a nine-property outdoor hospitality brand backed by Airstream, partnered with Hilton, and targeting 100 properties and 10,000 rooms within a decade. In this episode, Neil explains how AutoCamp raised close to $300 million to build out its real estate portfolio, why he structured the business as three separate companie...

Chris Kilcullen has spent three decades in hotels, closing more than $200 million in deals as a senior broker at Avison Young. He's also sold franchises, brokered acquisitions for a REIT, and now built his own hotel concept, so he's seen the flag question from every angle. In this episode, he and Michael dig into the real math: why a commodity economy hotel can lose 30 to 40 percent of its value the moment it drops its brand, and why a well-positioned independent or boutique property can out-ear...

He's not a hotel investor. He built his career in multifamily and self-storage, growing a portfolio that peaked near $1 billion across more than 4,000 units. But the way he underwrites deals, ranks markets, and raises capital works across every asset class, hotels included. That's exactly why he's on this show. Data beats gut feel by a million miles. That's his rule, and in this episode, he breaks down the two metrics he checks before touching any deal, the same ones that predict a hotel's pe...

Most hotel investors build the product first and spend years chasing an audience to fill it. This guest did the opposite, and it paid off big-time! In this episode, Michael Russell sits down with a former travel content creator who built a following of over a million people, then used years of staying in the world's best hotels to figure out exactly what makes a property worth sharing, and designed his own around it. That audience helped his first Bali hotel hit 80% occupancy in month one and p...

Most people walk past the ugly deal. That's exactly why the ugly deal is where the money is. In this episode, Michael Russell sits in the hot seat as a guest on the Lights On Podcast, sharing the unfiltered story behind how he acquired a rundown one-star motel in Maui during COVID and repositioned it into the number one small hostel in North America, growing annual revenue from $500K to $2.4 million in just a few years. Co-founder of Howzit Hostels and Malama Capital, Michael has built a hosp...

In this episode, you'll learn how to diagnose whether your property is actually a candidate for wellness positioning, and if it is, how to implement it in a way that lifts ADR without blowing out your expense line. A hospitality strategist who spent 20 years in hotel sales and development before building a consulting practice around wellness revenue joins us to share the playbook she's used across independent properties worldwide. Emily Johnson's approach has helped properties drive occupancy...

It took zero dollars of his own money to buy a $4.5 million waterfront resort. It took three years and over a million and a half dollars out of pocket just to keep it. In this episode, you'll discover the deal, debt, equity sequence he says has never failed to raise capital on a good deal, and exactly when a joint venture beats a syndication. A multifamily investor who scaled to over 600 rental units, and once raised $10 million without a following or a dollar from family, walks through the on...

Most boutique hotel operators are leaving serious money on the table, not because of bad locations or bad products, but because of bad marketing fundamentals that nobody told them about. In this episode, you'll hear exactly how one operator diagnosed a 40% occupancy problem and fixed it, taking her Bozeman boutique property to 80% occupancy with a $3,000 monthly marketing budget. A sixth-generation Montanan who started running a historic hotel at 23, sold her first property after 18 years for ...

What happens when you find a deal that could change everything, but you've drained your bank account just to close it? In this episode, you'll hear exactly how one operator went from cleaning parking lots to owning the building, and what that journey taught him about risk, focus, and building a business that doesn't need you in it every day. A vertically integrated hospitality operator who built an 84-door portfolio across two countries and is now pursuing a 140-key historic hotel in Sardinia...

Most people assume you need outside investors, a big budget, or a prime location to build a profitable hospitality brand. This episode proves otherwise. In this episode, you'll learn exactly how one builder went from working as a contractor to owning a luxury micro resort that nets over half a million dollars a year, with no syndication, no partners, and no fancy market. A builder and founder who bootstrapped a five-cabin luxury brand from $90,000 out of pocket joins the show to break down how...

You hit your targets. You built the business. So why does it still feel like something's missing? In this episode, you'll discover why deferring your happiness until the next deal, the next promotion, or the next milestone is quietly destroying your leadership, your team culture, and your returns. A personal freedom coach who has spent 30 years in hospitality and now works exclusively with CEOs and top executives joins the show to share the self-leadership framework that changes how high-achi...

What if you bought a rundown bed and breakfast on Zillow, moved in the next day, and turned it into Colorado's first luxury treehouse hotel, all without raising a single dollar from outside investors? That's exactly what Ashley LaRocque and her wife did. And six years later, their property is booked through 2027, generating six-figure wedding revenue they never saw coming. A former TV producer who left corporate life to build something from scratch, Ashley shares the unfiltered story of what i...

In this episode, you'll discover how a single ultra-niche lodging unit can outperform a full hotel on cash-on-cash returns and what that signals for boutique investors paying attention. A treehouse designer whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Architectural Digest, and HGTV joins us to break down the real numbers behind experiential lodging. Dustin Fighter has spent two decades building one-of-a-kind suspended structures, and his original pine cone treehouse, 60 feet in the air...

What if the most overlooked apartment deal in your market is already built, it's just flagged as a hotel? In this episode, you'll discover how a valuation gap between hotels and multifamily creates forced equity of 40 to 50% before you change a single wall, and why most investors completely miss it. A CEO who has completed over 30 hotel-to-apartment conversions across six states joins us to break down the exact strategy his firm has used to generate a 20% annualized return since inception. Ry...

Experienced real estate investors make the jump into hospitality every year. Most of them underestimate what they're getting into. In this episode, you'll hear what it actually looks like when a seasoned commercial operator buys his first boutique hotel, and what he'd do differently. A commercial real estate investor who built a $75M portfolio across retail, self-storage, flex space, and adaptive reuse projects shares the unfiltered story of acquiring, renovating, and opening Salt Ranch, a 48-...

What does it actually cost to build a boutique hotel from scratch in a foreign country? More than you think, and not just financially. A short-term rental operator running 220+ properties across 40 cities is now three years into building a 20-unit boutique resort in Medellin, Colombia. No bank financing. A licensing process that restarted from zero. And a price tag is climbing toward $4.5 million. Tim Hubbard joins the show to walk through every layer of this project with total transparency. I...

Most people who buy their first hospitality property don't realize they just bought themselves a 90-hour-a-week job. The difference between owning a business and being trapped inside one comes down to a single number most investors never bother to calculate before they sign. In this episode, you'll learn the exact revenue threshold your property needs to hit before you can hire real staff, implement real systems, and actually step away from day-to-day operations. A 26-year campground owner an...

Jasper Ribbers went from trading equities on Wall Street to traveling to 100 countries as a digital nomad, funding it all from a single Airbnb apartment in Amsterdam. Today, he manages pricing strategy for over $125 million in annual short-term rental bookings and co-founded Freewyld, a micro-resort brand in Idyllwild, California that's pulling $190 RevPAR against a $97 market average. In this episode, Jasper reveals which STR markets worldwide are generating the best returns right now, why 99% ...

What does a land investor who's done 400+ deals have to teach hotel investors? More than you'd expect. In this episode, you'll discover how the same principles behind finding off-market sellers, creating value through entitlements, and building passive income apply directly to hospitality investing, even if you've never bought a single acre of dirt. A former Army officer turned land-investing expert joins us to break down how he built a machine that generates $44,000 a month in passive income...