What The Senior Living Industry Can Learn From The Lodging Sector’s Wins, Biggest Mistakes

Many years ago, the U.S. hotel industry faced a critical moment as third-party companies such as Priceline or Expedia cemented a foothold with their customers. What followed was among the sector’s biggest mistakes, according to John Arabia, founder and CEO of Taylor Vance and lead independent director at Janus Living (NYSE: JAN). 

“One of the biggest mistakes the industry made was allowing intermediaries to play such a pivotal role getting between the customer and us,” Arabia told the audience during a panel at the 2026 NIC Fall Conference in Chicago.

Initially, executives were eager to fill up their properties, he said. But cracks in the model soon emerged. The problem stemmed from the fact that third-party booking companies eat into a hotel’s already tough-to-notch margins. For one, the cost to obtain a customer in the hotel business is higher when using a third-party booking service. Hotels also can’t control the customers’ experiences with intermediaries.

“The industry ended up funding its own worst enemy, so I would say be very careful about allowing intermediaries to fill your properties,” Arabia said.

In a similar sense, the senior living industry has its own intermediary in referral sites like A Place for Mom and Caring.com. While they are not perfect analogies for third-party hotel booking sites, the senior living industry faces a somewhat similar moment in how it acquires customers.

“We need to own the customer relationship from the very beginning,” Sunrise CEO Jack Callison said during the panel. “First impressions matter. This is a trust-based business, so why would I want to outsource that to anyone other than ourselves?”

Dealing with third-party intermediaries is not the only way the senior living industry resembles the hotel industry. Some operators, like Bonita Springs, Florida-based Discovery Senior Living, follow a strategy that helped companies like hotel management firm Aimbridge Hospitality scale in the past.

Discovery Senior Living operates under what CEO Richard Hutchinson called a “hybrid franchise model” that organizes the company’s communities into specific brands for different markets and regions. That way, prospective residents don’t perceive the company’s communities as run by an impersonal national company.

“We’re segmenting our markets because the consumer characteristics in each of these markets — secondary, tertiary, primary – are very different,” Hutchinson said during the panel. “Now, we have this model where we have separated our management companies that operate these bespoke playbooks specifically for that segment.”

Following the hotel brand playbook

Current Sonida Senior Living (NYSE: SNDA) Board Chairman and Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Horizon Capital Dave Johnson knows well the trajectory of the lodging sector in the last 20 years. He co-founded and as CEO led Aimbridge Hospitality until 2021, having grown the company’s platform to more than 1,600 hotels under management in 23 countries.

The senior living industry can learn about alignment from the hotel industry. In the 1970s and through the 1990s, hotel operators were “seen as a commodity” with little difference between the high- and low-performers, Johnson said.

Then came companies like Aimbridge Hospitality, which had a growth strategy centered on unique hotels with dozens of different brands. The company attracted private-equity investments from the likes of Blackstone and Starwood Capital, which treated the hotel operator not as a commodity but as a trusted partner.

In the hotel world, the flag flying over a building can mean everything. Senior living is different in that it’s the people working in the communities, not a national brand name on the building, that makes the most difference with residents and their families.

“We created brands that were sub-brands to the local market that would resonate,” Hutchinson said.

Sunrise does have a national brand it puts on buildings across the country, but it pairs that branding with personalized services. To that end, the company’s communities are meant to match the vibe of life in the surrounding area.

“You’re not building a community to the brochure, you’re building a community to the life that we live,” Callison said. “To me, that’s the power of the brand. … not just parachuting into new areas where we’re pioneering and trying to figure it out.”

Sunrise Senior Living CEO Jack Callison; photo by Tori Soper Photography Sunrise Senior Living CEO Jack Callison; photo by Tori Soper Photography

Using data, finding common terms

Data powers the U.S. lodging industry, and the sector’s progress building sophisticated data platforms and coming to common terms together could represent a blueprint for senior living operators to do the same.

Many years ago, hotel operators agreed to adopt common accounting terms that can help investors understand and underwrite the properties. Arabia believes that senior living operators can take a similar trajectory.

The hotel industry has implemented dynamic pricing in a way that senior living operators cannot currently. At hotels across the country, a room that costs $300 per night one day could cost more than double that amount on a more in-demand day.

But hotels can only know that information with data – and it’s not enough to simply pick up the phone and call your competitors, Johnson said.

“Again, it’s back to the data,” he added.

Hutchinson echoed the call for more unified senior living accounting principles. Discovery has created an agnostic data “funnel” that ingests data and converts it using common fundamentals. That output helps power the company’s business intelligence and analytics.

“If we’re growing … the day after we close, we are operating off the same data set, the common definitions, and the common managerial process,” he aid. “It’s not, ‘These guys do it this way, these guys do it that way.’ Spread it out to the industry. We need to get common data throughout the stack, not just on the economics side.”

Callison ended the panel by speaking directly to the audience:

“We need you to participate. It is bigger than you,” he said. “If we can get data transparency, it will unlock capital. It will unlock consumer trust.”

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