Vlad: For those who have no idea about you or the company, can you introduce who you are, what you do, and why people should choose you?
Juan: My name is Juan Olaya. I'm the Director of Revenue Strategy for LATAM at Our Habitas. We're a global brand defined by our ethos - luxury for the soul, or what some people have called barefoot luxury. We build highly experiential luxury hotels in remote locations where people come to disconnect in order to reconnect.
Vlad: What is something you understand about revenue on the luxury side that most companies get wrong or misunderstand? There are so many sub-niches - serviced apartments, hotel groups, luxury - and each approaches the market differently.
Juan: In luxury, and especially in experiential luxury where we sit, there's a lot of talk about occupancy, ADR, and the classic RevPAR metrics. But we run hotels where other departments - F&B, recreation, even transportation and wellness - can be up to 50 percent of a property's total revenue. So total guest value is much more important than just occupancy and ADR. Traditional hospitality has been highly focused on rooms, but here it's the whole experience ecosystem.
Vlad: Your revenue spans experience, F&B, and community. What part of optimizing across those streams is far more complex than it looks from the outside?
Juan: The hardest part is condensing the data from so many different revenue outlets and making informed commercial decisions that take every input into account. The disconnection of those data silos translates into operational silos and misalignment between teams. Right now we're working with operations, marketing, sales, and revenue to define the whole commercial direction for a given month, and it's genuinely difficult: we have a campaign we want to run - how does that translate into wellness, into F&B, into the experiences we're offering? How do we give coherence to the overall brand expectation the guest has when they book? It seems easy, but it definitely isn't.
Vlad: In digital luxury everyone assumes it must be expensive - and that's normal, because you can't deliver the same experience cheaply. Why is pricing a high-touch experience so much harder than pricing one room night?
Juan: This comes from the classical view. When revenue managers started in this field, you were just pricing a room; everything else was a fixed allowance or allocation. Now we're designing the whole journey. Take a brand I look up to in one of our destinations, Awasi - also experiential luxury, but all-inclusive. When you hear all-inclusive you might imagine the classic massive resort with all the food and drinks you want. They approach it differently: all-inclusive means your private chef, your private excursions with a jeep, the transportation, all the layers. For us, every rate we sell starts with a room, then includes breakfast for the F&B component, and every community activity happening on site. We do pinto and tinto - we bring an artist, share a few glasses of wine - because one of the company's ethos is community, bringing together the local communities where we settle, the travelers staying with us, and our staff. Morning yoga, healing experiences - all included in the rate. That makes it much harder, because there's no direct comparison. Competitors are pricing a room, sometimes with breakfast. How do you price all that emotional value? We know a suite in a high-end market might be 500 euros, a luxury room 300, a standard room 150, and the concept moves between those brackets - but how do you measure the experiences? There's no benchmark. That's what makes it harder, but also more interesting, and gives you much more flexibility.
Vlad: What happens behind the scenes when you set rates for a destination where demand is driven by events and experiences?
Juan: A good example is Tulum. It's a highly seasonal destination - a very strong high season and a difficult low season. For context: pre-Covid, Tulum became one of the epicenters of electronic music worldwide, alongside Mykonos and Ibiza. During Covid it stayed more open than most places, so there was a massive boom with almost no seasonality, all driven by events. Now demand patterns have shifted - nearby tertiary markets like Bacalar, where we have another hotel, are getting more traction, and Tulum is stabilizing back toward previous levels. When we price the big event windows - the first 15 days of January, when the day-zero shows and the biggest DJs come - you have to anticipate that demand. In high season we have a lead time of 60 to 90 days, but for that peak event period it can be 180 days, so the pickup curve fills much faster. Two things can go wrong: if you overprice because you assume it'll be better than last year and people won't pay, you have to drop your price as the window approaches - but by then they've made other plans. If you underprice, you fill up super fast and the busiest, most important weeks of the year are gone with no way to compensate. It's a very delicate balance between reading past data - which never guarantees next year - and monitoring on a tighter time scale than your normal day-to-day.
Vlad: How do you balance relying on third-party channels versus direct bookings? Everyone chases direct, but it's hard until you have a brand people search for. Third party is easier for discovery, but there are commissions.
Juan: You need the right mix for your property. You shouldn't over-rely on one channel, because if something happens to it, you're done. A healthy mix that leans a bit toward direct is better in my opinion, because direct is more profitable and has a longer value per client. When someone books through your website, you control the whole narrative from discovery to post-checkout, and there's a higher chance they become a brand ambassador. As a global chain, we want someone who loved AlUla in Saudi Arabia to eventually travel to Tulum or Bacalar - these are people with high disposable income seeking exotic places every year. When someone books through a big OTA, that channel is capturing them in its own database and incentivizing them with future discounts and stay credits to stay loyal to the channel, not to you. Those loyalty schemes keep growing. Capturing that guest directly means a longer, higher lifetime value for us. So: the right mix, favoring direct.
Vlad: How do you protect the luxury brand against the pressure to maximize occupancy, while still meeting the high expectations that come with a high price?
Juan: By working very closely with the operational teams and finance, understanding our margins in each department and where high-demand periods let us yield higher prices. Instead of leaving everything as-is and giving exactly the same service, we ask what extra we can give so the guest feels a personalized touch, and we make sure the front desk is aware. In Tulum, someone in low season might book a room for $200; in early January that same room is a thousand euros. Someone paying a thousand euros knows the value isn't only the objective value of the room - it's also being in Tulum during that event window. That's part of the price. But on top of that, we want them blown away by the experience. Good communication between ops and revenue is fundamental to guaranteeing those expectations are met.
Vlad: What is one belief about revenue management that most other directors in luxury would disagree with?
Juan: That we should change what the department is about. We should talk less about revenue and more about profit. If I sell 800,000 at a low acquisition cost instead of a million at a high one, the flow-through to that department and to the hotel's overall GOP for the month is higher. When everything comes down to GOP and EBITDA, the numbers look better for the owners and stakeholders. If I'm deciding how top-line revenue filters down to the bottom of the P&L and I ignore the profitability impact, I'm missing a massive part of the value I can create. Revenue managers should shift to being profit managers - and then total profit managers, because these hotels rely so heavily on wellness, recreation, and F&B. There's so much we can take from the revenue strategies we apply to rooms and use in other departments. Thirty years ago, airlines were doing advanced dynamic pricing while hotels priced flat across the year. Now hotels price rooms dynamically - so why aren't we dynamically pricing restaurants and wellness? Why aren't we thinking about how much each client is willing to pay at different moments of the year, times of day, or points in the guest journey?
Vlad: So it's a shift in the department, or at least its name, because there are more responsibilities - especially around margin.
Juan: Yes. I don't care about the name. It's more about shaking the rigid mental structures of what the business should be and what it could be.
Vlad: There's a lot of AI noise now - everyone trying to implement it. Where do you think AI could have a real, need-to-have impact for a company like yours in luxury hotels, not just a nice-to-have?
Juan: There's this framing of humans versus AI, and I see it differently. I've been going down the AI rabbit hole for months - I started vibe-coding my own tools for personal use and using AI in some of my business tools - and there's a tremendous edge in the things humans aren't good at and don't enjoy. I don't know anyone who says their day was amazing because they downloaded 10 Excel sheets and copy-pasted formulas cell by cell from one document to another. But I know plenty of people who love the brand, the storytelling, the strategy, thinking about how to connect more deeply with the people who want to stay with us. So AI should, and most likely will, handle data processing, optimization, automation of manual work, and finding patterns in big chunks of data - which our brains struggle to do at scale. What AI lacks is the sector experience, the holistic view of what interacts best with the clients we want, and that human input. The big competitive edge is translating the data AI helps us organize and automate into better experience design - and eventually into better revenue.
Vlad: So it's more of a collaboration - freeing you from the manual, time-consuming work.
Juan: Yes, and it aligns with what I said earlier. Our role has been heavily based on the analysis layer, and we're going to shift more toward product and brand strategy. The first two layers - data collection and analysis - will be heavily influenced by automation, saving us time so we can spend more of it on great, innovative strategies.
Vlad: How much does seasonality disrupt your strategy - winter, summer, new property openings, destination demand you can't control?
Juan: It's complex, especially because our destinations are usually secondary or even tertiary - very exotic, remote, hard to get to, which is part of the appeal. But because there isn't the constant demand of a Paris, Madrid, or New York, you can't forecast as far out with much accuracy, and a big event can shift things heavily. Another Tulum example: there's a natural phenomenon called sargassum, a seaweed that washes onto the coast. Some years it's minimal; we do a great job cleaning the beach every day and it looks pristine, but in the morning it can show up because it's a natural phenomenon we can't control. If word of mouth says there's more sargassum this season, people investigate and might choose Bacalar instead, a lagoon that isn't affected. So you come back to being very much on top of your pace and pickup curve, not assuming this year repeats last year. Robust, clean past data is the foundation - one outlook - but if past data doesn't match your window this year, you need to catch that fast and implement tactics even faster.
Vlad: What's more important for your audience - the view and location, or the interior of the room and the sense of space?
Juan: People love that our rooms are great, but the fact that in our oceanfronts you can lie in bed, look to your right, and see the beautiful Caribbean - that cannot be matched by any fancy marble floor or gold faucet. Luxury doesn't look like that anymore for a lot of these brands. Take Aman - a different level, and their edge is silence, a place where you come back to your inner self. That kind of luxury isn't ostentatious. It's not the bling, the gold, the old-school 19th-century Ritz-culture luxury we'd imagine in early-20th-century Paris. That's no longer what luxury looks like for a lot of brands. The people coming to us aren't looking for the gold faucet - they're looking for the beautiful view, or being surrounded by monkeys in the middle of nature.
Vlad: What's the biggest source of friction your revenue team feels day to day that guests never see?
Juan: Not friction exactly, but a challenge: how to incorporate AI and process automation into our daily workflows. We're setting up an AI committee within the company and I'm already working with teams on how to best deploy it. The challenge is that it's not like being a self-employed content creator who sets up workflows with a team of one, two, or three people. When you're a corporate company of 20 or 50-plus people, it gets much more complex - everyone is grinding and doing their best with the tools they have. It's important that companies treat this as a global impact on the industry and make it a cohesive, coherent corporate decision about how to deploy it best.
Vlad: If you had a magic wand to eliminate one manual revenue or forecasting workflow tomorrow, what would it be?
Juan: I've actually done that already - I have my magic wand: a BI tool we partner with, and I was so happy when we implemented it. I love having clarity in the data, and one of the biggest frictions was how fragmented the data is across departments. Since we got the BI tool, that's improved a lot. Before, I was building the classic pickup report manually - on-the-books, how much we're doing, how much we could still capture, which segments. With the wand, plus the built-in AI tools, I built workflows so now for my revenue call I open one browser tab and 10 dashboards open automatically with live data. That's been a massive game changer for my day-to-day. I still have other workflows I'd like to automate - pulling data that isn't yet inside the system, having a report automatically compiled and sent to my inbox - and I'm not entirely sure yet how I'd do all of it, but I know it's possible, and that's the next thing I want to build.
Vlad: Where can people find out more about you and the company?
Juan: Our website is ourhabitas.com - Habitas with an H and an S. You can find us on Instagram and LinkedIn, and me, Juan Olaya, on LinkedIn as well. I'd be happy to welcome you to our hotels - we have destinations in Africa, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Chile, and Mexico, with much more in the pipeline.
Vlad: Thank you so much for everything you shared today. I'll put all the links in the description.
Juan: Likewise, thank you - it was a pleasure.
