One language of goals and measures: the turnaround of a $1.5 billion resort

Gaylord National opened at enormous scale: a brand new $1.5 billion convention resort, the largest hotel on the Eastern Seaboard, and its first months tested it severely. Rooms came online behind demand, early guest experiences fell short of the brand’s standard, some conventions wavered, and the property posted a $10 million loss in its first month, with guest satisfaction at 36 percent.

The situation

A convention resort lives on group business, and group business runs on reputation. Meeting planners talk to each other, so every difficult event made the next booking harder, and the 2,000 room property, with half a million square feet of convention space, was still learning to catch problems before guests felt them. With 45 departments and thousands of employees and vendor staff, good intentions were everywhere. Shared priorities were not.

What I did

The first weeks were triage: complete the room turnover and deploy a service optimization and asset management system so basic operations could function.

Then the real work, restoring customer confidence. I ran a deep dive across every guest feedback channel and mapped the moments of truth across the full guest lifecycle, pulling data from sister properties so we could anticipate what returning groups would expect. I ran process mapping and improvement sessions across departments that rarely sat together, housekeeping with the front office, and implemented Franklin Covey’s Four Disciplines of Execution so every team carried a small number of goals it could actually move.

The core of the work was measurement people could act on. I built leading and lagging indicators from the general manager down to the frontline across all 45 departments, deployed a text analytics platform to turn thousands of guest comments into usable signal, and connected the data into guest profiles and dashboards that tracked performance to the associate level. Then we trained and coached roughly 2,500 Marriott and vendor employees on the system, because a measurement architecture nobody understands is furniture.

From there it became continuous improvement: revised journey maps, post-event debriefs with meeting planners, focus groups, handheld devices that let housekeepers prioritize room cleans by guest arrival, and repositioning the signature steakhouse as a destination restaurant.

What happened

Guest satisfaction rose from 36 to 62 percent. Meeting planner top-box scores rose from 38 to 72 percent. The property hit at least 105 percent of its financial goals year over year, and rebookings rose 50 percent. What I remember most is quieter than any of those numbers: a housekeeper, a chef, and the general manager could describe the same priorities in the same words.