About

It started with an empty pool bar

Not empty of people. Empty of any way to spend money.

I'm Ross. I travel a lot, and I have the kind of brain that counts things.

On a trip to Asia I was staying at a hotel with a beautiful pool and no menus at it. Not a bad menu — no menu. So I started counting: how many people were at that pool each day, and how many of them would happily have bought a drink if anyone had made it possible. Almost nobody ordered. Not because they didn't want to. Because the hotel simply hadn't catered for it.

Once you notice one gap you start seeing the rest. I looked at the restaurant and found no menu structure at all — breakfast items still sitting above dinner dishes at dinner time, a layout that guided your eye nowhere, no anchor dish to price anything against. Then I looked wider: the spa, room service, bookings, laundry. Every service they offered had a hole in it somewhere.

And it kept happening. Every property I stayed at afterwards had gaps across some or all of the same things. So I started assessing them properly — guest pass-through rates, the moments where spend was possible and nothing captured it, the revenue walking out of the building every day. The numbers seemed crazy to me.

Hotels spend enormous energy maximising occupancy. Once the guest is actually inside, there's very little effort to maximise what they spend. I still don't fully know why.

So OptimaCX was built.

What we believe

Occupancy is solved. Spend is not.

Hotels pour budget into filling rooms — channel managers, OTA commissions, rate optimisation, paid search. Then the guest arrives and the effort stops. There is an entire discipline for getting people through the door and almost nothing for what happens once they're inside.

The gaps are physical, not strategic.

No menu at the pool. Breakfast items still on the board at dinner. No anchor dish to price against. A spa nobody mentions at check-in. These are not complex problems. They are unnoticed ones — and each is worth real money every single day.

A report is not a result.

Consultants deliver findings and leave. We redesign the menu, write the scripts, train the team, then come back and check the numbers. The work isn't finished when the document is.

You should not have to raise prices.

Every uplift we target comes from better structure, better placement and better conversations — not from charging your guests more. Price rises are the easy lever and the one guests notice.

Who actually does the work

Menu engineering, guest journey mapping and training design are done by us directly — the same method on every property, not handed to a rotating cast of subcontractors.

On-site audits are carried out by trained assessors briefed against our framework, who stay as ordinary guests so what they experience is what your guests experience. You get the findings, the fixes and the tracking — not just a scorecard.

Want to know what your property is leaving behind?

We'll look at your menus and touchpoints and send you the gaps we find. Free, and no call required.

Request a free snapshot Run the numbers first