Part Three: Building the Commercial Flight Simulator

Eventually I realized something.

Every app I had built taught one skill.

Real hotel leaders don’t make one decision. They make hundreds. At the same time.

Marketing affects demand. Demand affects pricing. Pricing affects distribution. Distribution affects profitability.

Everything influences asset value.

So I stopped thinking about exercises. I started thinking about simulations.

The ComLens Decision Lab

The result became the ComLens Decision Lab.

Four hotels. One market.

Every team starts with different strengths and weaknesses.

Each week they make commercial decisions. Marketing investments. Pricing strategies. Distribution choices. Sales initiatives.

Then the market responds.

Sometimes your decisions work.

Sometimes they don’t. Just like real life.

The winner isn’t the hotel with the biggest budget.

It’s the team that thinks commercially and grows the value of their asset.

That’s the entire point of ComLens.

Then I built a coach

One challenge remained.

Sales conversations.

Reading about selling doesn’t create confidence.

Practicing does.

So I built HotelBCoach.

Instead of watching videos, learners have live conversations with AI.

They respond to objections. Ask discovery questions. Build value. Handle resistance.

When the conversation ends, they receive coaching on what they did well and where they can improve.

No waiting for an instructor. No embarrassment. Just practice. Again and again.

The newest experiment

The latest project might become the most useful yet.

Over the past several years, I’ve built commercial planning prompts that generate strategic hotel marketing plans.

First they lived inside Claude.

Then inside ChatGPT.

Now I’m building with Microsoft Copilot.

Instead of producing generic marketing ideas, the system analyzes market conditions, revenue management opportunities, distribution strategy, sales priorities, and commercial risks before recommending a coordinated plan.

It’s less about writing a document. It’s more about helping commercial leaders think strategically.

So…what’s next?

I’m still teaching hotel commercial strategy. But now I am also experimenting with a hotel, looking at each of its sales systems to see how they can be automated and augmented.

I’m just doing it with a slightly larger laboratory.

And probably a few more beakers than is considered healthy.

To learn more about ComLens – the cohort that brings this all to life – go to https://hotelbschool.com/commercial-fluency/