The Lights On Podcast

The Lights On Podcast features conversations with hospitality leaders about the commercial strategies that drive hotel performance and growth.

The Lights On Podcast is a business podcast hosted by Kin Sio, with 22 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Kin Sio hosts The Lights On Podcast, a business show with 22 episodes published.

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  The Lights On Podcast

  Why Hotels Get Taxed First (But the Business Next Door Doesn't) With Jason Brandt

  Aug 20, 202651 min

  Jason Brandt is the President and CEO of the Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association (ORLA), the leading business association representing Oregon's foodservice and lodging industry. ORLA represents just over 2,800 members and advocates for an industry of more than 10,000 foodservice establishments and over 2,000 lodging properties, some 12,000 small business locations employing close to 220,000 Oregonians. At ORLA, Jason champions Oregon's hospitality industry on issues including taxation, operating costs, workforce development, and tourism growth. Before joining ORLA, he served as CEO of the Salem Area Chamber of Commerce, where he represented businesses and worked with state and local policymakers. In this episode… Hotels get taxed first because the guest paying the tax does not vote in the election that set it. That is the whole mechanism. Kin Sio sits down with Jason Brandt on The Lights On Podcast to unpack how lodging taxes stack up, where the money actually goes, and what an operator can do about it. Jason Brandt runs the Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association, a statewide trade group with just over 2,800 members. He counts roughly 120 separate local lodging taxes across Oregon at the city and county level, layered on top of a statewide tax. In a market like Portland, the stack reaches 16% of the total lodging stay. Oregon is also one of only four states left without a broad-based sales tax, which Jason says puts a bigger target on lodging operators. The effect is a permanent defensive crouch: his team spends its time stopping the next increase instead of holding the ball and putting points on the board. His counter-argument is an economic one, not a political one. A lodging tax dollar should function like an export: send it out through destination marketing and it comes back as visitor spending that would never have reached the state otherwise. Jason also walks through the cost side of the P&L, including FSA wellness accounts that reduce employer FICA taxes without changing what employees take home, and a group insurance program that saves the average ORLA member over $3,500 a year in premiums. In this episode of The Lights On Podcast , Kin Sio is joined by Jason Brandt, President and CEO of the Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association (ORLA), to discuss why lodging businesses get taxed first. They cover the 120-plus local lodging taxes stacked across Oregon, the export economy case for spending tax dollars on outbound marketing, and the workforce culture that separates low-turnover operators from the rest. Jason also shares what any operator should ask their own state association.

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  The Lights On Podcast

  She Wore a Wig To Grade Your Hotel With Stephanie Leger

  Aug 13, 202650 min

  Stephanie Leger is the Founder and Chief Excellence Officer at First Rate Hospitality, a consultancy specializing in hospitality training, service evaluations, and operational improvement. With over 20 years of global hotel industry experience — including work with The Ritz-Carlton, Mandarin Oriental, AAA, and Forbes Travel Guide — Stephanie has trained more than 20,000 hospitality professionals. Her hands-on approach helps hospitality teams build stronger cultures and deliver consistently exceptional service. In this episode… A hotel stay is rarely won or lost in one dramatic moment. It is shaped by the small details guests notice before check-in, during every interaction, and long after checkout, so what does an undercover inspector really look for when deciding whether a property delivers genuine service excellence? According to Stephanie Leger, a luxury hospitality expert and former incognito hotel inspector, the answer is consistency that still feels human. From ensuring website photos match the actual property to handling a delayed room with care, she explains that every interaction adds to the guest's overall impression, and rigid scripts can quickly make service feel robotic. When hotels train their teams to communicate, anticipate needs, and show genuine interest, they can earn stronger reviews, greater loyalty, and better financial results. In this episode of The Lights On Podcast , Kin Sio is joined by Stephanie Leger, Founder and Chief Excellence Officer at First Rate Hospitality, to discuss how undercover hotel inspections reveal the true guest experience. They explore why she wore a wig, how small service failures compound, and how hotels can make standards feel less robotic. Stephanie also shares advice on onboarding, communication, and natural front-desk upselling.

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  The Lights On Podcast

  The Long Game of Hotel PR With Melissa Benhaim

  Aug 6, 202640 min

  Melissa Benhaim is the Founder of Benhaim Public Relations, a Miami-based consultancy specializing in travel and hospitality PR for independent hotels and tourism brands. Since launching her firm in 2019, she has helped clients earn coverage in outlets such as The New York Times , Business Insider , and Travel + Leisure . Melissa is a three-time Smart PR Best Pitch winner and an HSMAI Adrian Award recipient for a social media campaign that generated a 150x ROI. She began her career in hotel operations at Four Seasons before moving into hospitality PR, giving her a practical approach to helping independent hotels build visibility and compete with larger brands. In this episode… Independent hotels earn national media by running two clocks at once. Long-lead features can take a year or more to land, so they run alongside shorter-lead placements that keep the property visible in between. Impact gets measured through referral traffic and guest surveys. Kin Sio sits down with Melissa Benhaim, Founder of Benhaim Public Relations, on The Lights On Podcast to break down how hotel PR actually works. Melissa started in hotel operations at Four Seasons before crossing over to the agency side, and that background shows up in how she builds campaigns. Her Travel + Leisure feature for Flamingo Lodge and Restaurant in the Everglades began with an editor query in January 2024, moved through a writer visit, a separate photographer visit, and rounds of fact-checking, and ran about 14 months end to end. The payoff was an eight-page print feature plus an accompanying online piece. A New York Times "52 Places to Go" mention for the same property produced a visible spike in website visits the day it went live, and at least one guest who told the property team that is where they read about it. She also covers what works when the budget is small. A partnership with a local graffiti artist brought nine times the usual Sunday ticket sales for a museum client during a slow Miami August. A Christmas in July Facebook offer campaign spent roughly $750 and returned more than $110,000, work that earned an HSMAI Adrian Award. And the move Melissa pushes hardest costs nothing extra: use the CVB membership the hotel already pays for, and host the media the tourism board is already bringing into the destination.

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  The Lights On Podcast

  Why 94% of Hotels Are Invisible To AI Search With Nick Slavin

  Jul 30, 202646 min

  Nick Slavin is the CEO and Co-founder of Curacity, a hospitality technology company that transforms media visibility into measurable hotel bookings and revenue. Under Nick's leadership, Curacity has generated $2 billion in verified bookings and revenue and established partnerships with Preferred Hotels & Resorts and The Leading Hotels of the World. The company recently launched VISTA, a platform that uses authoritative editorial mentions to improve visibility across AI search. Before co-founding Curacity in 2015, Nick served on the portfolio management team for Starwood Capital Group's $4.2 billion Opportunity Fund IX, focusing on real estate and hotel investments. In this episode… AI search is binary, not ranked. When a traveler asks Claude or ChatGPT where to stay, the model returns a short list of hotels it recommends, and everything else effectively disappears. Slavin cites industry data showing 94% of hotels are invisible in these AI results, largely because their websites lack structured data and the authoritative third-party coverage that large language models trust. Kin Sio sits down with Nick Slavin, CEO and Co-founder of Curacity, on The Lights On Podcast to break down why most hotels are missing from AI search and how independent properties can earn their way back in. Slavin has watched this problem take shape from the inside. Before founding Curacity in 2015, he managed hotel investments at Starwood Capital Group, including the Baccarat Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where he saw how hard it was to prove that top-of-funnel marketing actually drove bookings. That gap became Curacity's mission: connect the media and content that inspire a trip to the revenue it produces. Research the company ran with Skift found a revealing disconnect. 39% of hotel executives call digital ads one of their most effective booking drivers, while only 18% of travelers say an ad ever led them to book. Ask those same travelers about established media, and 81% say a recommendation from a trusted outlet drove a real booking. That authority now decides who shows up in AI answers. Slavin points to data showing 77% of hotel sites lack structured data and 71% of AI recommendations come from articles and reviews rather than hotel websites. Curacity's new VISTA platform measures how a property ranks across Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, then uses the company's decade of media relationships to earn the editorial coverage that moves those rankings. For independent hotels, Slavin argues, this is the first real opening in 20 years to take share back from the OTAs, and the operators who move early build a lead that compounds.

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  The Lights On Podcast

  What Makes a Hospitality Brand Endure With Sean Dee

  Jul 23, 202648 min

  Sean Dee is the Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at OUTRIGGER Hospitality Group, a Hawai'i-based company specializing in iconic beach resorts across the globe. He leads the company's global commercial strategy across marketing, sales, revenue management, brand, and distribution. Sean was named HSMAI's 2022 Corporate Marketing Professional of the Year and serves as Chairperson of the Hawai'i Visitors and Convention Bureau, having also served on the HSMAI Americas Board of Directors. His leadership roles at Levi Strauss & Co., Hard Rock International, and Anschutz Entertainment Group shaped his expertise in brand reinvention and hospitality innovation. In this episode… Enduring hospitality brands do not survive change by abandoning who they are. They evolve by returning to what made people care in the first place, then deciding where to grow from there. Sean Dee, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at OUTRIGGER Hospitality Group, has run that play twice, first reviving Hard Rock International and now repositioning OUTRIGGER. Kin Sio sits down with Sean on The Lights On Podcast to break down how brands endure. When Dee joined Hard Rock in 2003, the brand was ten straight years into decline and had drifted into a museum, an academy, and Hard Rock food served on Delta flights. His team tracked down the original founders, Peter Morton and Isaac Tigrett, to understand what the 1971 London cafe was actually built on, then rebuilt the brand around one ownable idea: delivering experiences that rock. They widened the music from a narrow hard-rock genre to hip hop and other genres, opening the brand to younger, higher-spending guests. Dee estimates the enterprise value grew to roughly six times what it was when the turnaround began. At OUTRIGGER, Dee applied the same discipline. He narrowed the company from a mix of airport hotels, mid-market flags, and the three-star Ohana brand down to beachfront Outrigger Resorts, positioned where local culture meets world-class hospitality. Under KSL Capital Partners, which acquired the company in late 2016, OUTRIGGER now runs 31 properties, including 13 beachfront resorts across all four major Hawaiian islands plus Thailand, the Maldives, and Mauritius. As Chairperson of the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau, Dee also makes a pointed case on tourism: the problem was never the 10.4 million visitor peak, but the tens of thousands of illegal vacation units operating in residential neighborhoods, while visitors already contribute a billion dollars a year in tax revenue.

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