Owner alignment is not established by a GM saying they think like an owner. It becomes visible when priorities, spending rights, reporting and escalation are clear. You should know what management is trying to achieve, what it can decide independently and when your approval is required. The GM should know the same things without having to interpret a different instruction every time you visit the property.
Vaishakh Surendran discussed this directly in his interview with Hospitality News, reflecting on his time as General Manager of Mercure Chennai (Sriperumbudur), a 100-room Accor property serving manufacturing executives from Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Europe alongside Indian corporate and technical staff from roughly 400 companies in the surrounding industrial zone. Asked about rate strategy in that cost-sensitive market, he put the owner relationship in plain terms:
"My owners build a hotel to sustain for at least 10 to 20 years, not for 5 years. If I keep on increasing rates every year it will not help me. My long-term objective is to make sure that my hotel is sustainable — that it offers value for money for the customer as well as for us. It has to be win-win."
That statement is the alignment test in miniature: a GM who can articulate the owner’s time horizon, not just this quarter’s occupancy, is one an owner can actually delegate to. The same interview includes a concrete instance of the principle in practice — restructuring the hotel’s own billing process to match the purchase-order systems used by its corporate clients, rather than expecting 400 companies to adapt to standard hotel invoicing. In his words, the goal was to become the client’s “preferred vendor.” That is alignment behaviour: absorbing the operational cost of flexibility because it protects the account relationship the owner depends on.
Explain your cash requirements, operating expectations, available funds and intended position for the property. Distinguish what must happen now from what can be developed over time. Avoid giving the GM an occupancy target while separately demanding a cash result that assumes a different commercial strategy. Your objectives should be coherent enough for department heads to make decisions that support them. Revisit them when the hotel’s circumstances materially change.
Agree authority for recruitment, pricing exceptions, credit, purchasing, refunds and capital proposals at levels appropriate to the hotel. Specify what happens in an emergency. The aim is not to require owner approval for every minor task, but to prevent ambiguity about commitments that affect cash or risk. Keep a record of approvals and changes. Informal messages can support communication, but the agreed decision should reach the people responsible for execution.
Ask the GM to bring options, consequences and a recommendation when seeking approval. Challenge the assumptions rather than bypassing management with conflicting instructions to staff. If service or spending concerns recur, examine the system and responsibility directly. The GM must also raise problems early, including ones that reflect poorly on current performance. Alignment depends on honest reporting, not a monthly presentation designed only to reassure you.
Staffing, service promises and commercial terms should be reviewed as linked operating choices. A guest inclusion has a delivery cost; a cost reduction may change workload or service capacity. Ask for the trade-off and supporting evidence. The same interview describes exactly this kind of trade-off: a corporate account was at risk because the hotel’s standard South Indian and Continental breakfast did not serve its East and Southeast Asian guests. Rather than a blanket menu expansion, the team researched which ingredients already overlapped with Indian and Southeast Asian cooking and added a bounded Chinese breakfast offering — a modest, costed response to a specific, evidenced problem, not an open-ended concession. Do not assume all expenditure is wasteful or every service idea creates value. Agreement about objectives is useful only when it guides decisions that compete for limited money and attention.
Document reporting definitions, approval rules and key operating commitments. Plan for leave, turnover and handover so one manager does not become the only person who understands the business. Review progress against decisions rather than relying on whether the owner and GM get along. A respectful relationship matters, but the hotel also needs a repeatable way to identify problems, authorise responses and check completion.
Set an expectation that material service failures, cash pressure, staffing disruption and unapproved exposure reach the owner promptly through an agreed route. Define materiality for the property’s circumstances. Avoid creating a culture in which reporting a problem immediately attracts blame while delaying it is easier. The GM must remain accountable, but honest escalation is part of that accountability. Ask for the known facts, immediate response, unresolved risks and next update rather than an instant polished explanation.
Regular presence can be useful, yet direct instructions to several departments can undermine the operating chain if they conflict with the agreed plan. Route changes through the responsible manager and record material decisions. Conversely, the GM should not use delegation to deny the owner legitimate visibility. The practical balance is clear information and reserved approvals alongside management authority for delivery. Both excessive intervention and unexamined trust can leave responsibility uncertain when something goes wrong.
If environmental credentials feature in the hotel’s strategy, inspect the relevant documents rather than accepting an informal description. The same Mercure property, for example, ran a full EV fleet — three BYD and two Tata vehicles covering all airport and office transfers — and had eliminated single-use plastics across guest rooms and back-of-house, both genuine cost commitments in a market where cost control is a primary competitive variable. IGBC’s current Green Hotels framework distinguishes requirements from awarded certification levels; registration alone should not be described as an achieved rating. This illustrates a broader alignment principle: the owner and GM should use the same verifiable description of the property in commercial and public communications.
A leader’s account can surface useful operating questions and, where it is checked against the original recording, real evidence — as the quotes above are. It does not by itself establish current results at a different property, or substitute for your own hotel’s figures. Keep the advisory analysis visibly separate from the interview material. On the underlying commercial point, Vaishakh was direct about where the discipline actually sits:
"...people as a investor people shouldn’t feel bad — you know I’ve got a great product but I’m actually being undersold and I’m losing money, so it has to be win-win. As an operator we always make sure we have the right product for the market, and for the owner we make sure that whatever strategy we’re following right now should be sustainable for a long period of time. It shouldn’t be a short-term thing."
That is the owner-alignment test from the operator’s side: a GM who can name the risk of underselling the owner’s asset, not only the risk of overcharging the guest.
Imagine the owner asks a department head to introduce a new inclusion while the GM is enforcing a tighter approved budget. Staff now face conflicting instructions. Resolve the decision through the agreed authority, cost it and communicate one current direction. This hypothetical example is not a criticism of owner involvement. It illustrates why alignment needs a process as well as goodwill. If ownership changes the commercial brief, management must be able to update resources and expectations accordingly. Accountability becomes unfair when the operating target changes informally but the reporting baseline does not.
Request the operating brief, approval matrix, monthly action log, budget assumptions, material contracts and management handover records. Use a defined review period and make sure the GM and finance team agree which version is current. Where the information is missing, record that limitation rather than filling the gap with an estimate presented as fact. Keep the main review short, with supporting detail available for questions. The purpose is not to create paperwork for its own sake: it is to give the owner enough evidence to approve a decision, understand the exposure and hold the responsible manager accountable for completion.
Start with these questions: Are our expectations consistent? Who can decide this? What information should reach me before the commitment is made? Ask management to distinguish an observed result, its explanation and the proposed response. They are not the same thing. Where the answer involves judgement, identify the assumption and what evidence could change it. Agree which decisions belong to the GM within the approved plan and which need owner approval. Avoid taking over routine execution; require clarity about responsibility, timing and the next update instead. The central risk to guard against is replacing governance with either constant owner intervention or complete delegation without visibility.
For the next review cycle, agree a written owner–GM operating brief and resolve the three most common approval ambiguities. Give the task a named lead and a completion date appropriate to your hotel. Check whether it was completed and what changed, rather than simply carrying the same instruction forward each month. Record any financial commitment separately from a discussion or recommendation. If the evidence does not support the original response, revise it openly. The owner-side objective is a better operating decision with a clear basis, not a more optimistic presentation or a promise that cannot be verified.