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I have watched hotel owners walk into conversations with brands and operators completely unprepared for what they are actually doing.
Not unprepared in the way most people mean — without a business plan or a financial model. Those they usually have. Unprepared in a way that is harder to see and more expensive to fix.
The moment you pick up the phone with a brand or an operator, you have already begun negotiating. You just don't know it yet.
The Experience Gap Is Structural
Brand development teams and operator business development teams do this every day. They work across dozens of markets, asset types, and deal structures simultaneously. They know their fee flexibility, their PIP requirements, where they need to grow, which geographies are priorities, and which deal profiles typically work for their model.
For operators, that knowledge goes even deeper — which asset types they can run profitably, which markets have the labor and vendor relationships they need, which ownership structures they prefer to work with, and which deals they have quietly passed on and why.
This is not an advantage either side created unfairly. It is what institutional repetition produces. Brand and operator teams are very good at a process that most hotel owners encounter once or twice in a career.
That experience gap is real and structural. It is not about intelligence or sophistication on either side. It is about repetition. And it means that two parties who both want the same thing — a well-matched, long-term partnership — often enter the conversation at very different levels of preparation.
Brands want qualified projects. Operators want assets they can perform on. Owners want the right long-term partner and the strongest possible terms. Those interests are aligned. But they are best served when both sides come to the table with clarity.
What Happens Without That Preparation
In the first fifteen minutes of a conversation with a brand or operator, most owners unintentionally reveal things that affect the rest of the process.
Whether they are talking to anyone else. What their primary concern is — returns, brand recognition, operational simplicity, timeline. Whether they have a lender in the picture. How much they understand about the brand's typical fee structure or the operator's management fee expectations in that market. How urgent the decision actually feels to them.
An experienced development or business development team will absorb this naturally and shape the conversation accordingly. That is simply professional practice. But if an owner shares this information without a clear strategy — without knowing what they want to reveal and when — they lose the ability to control how the process unfolds.
The result is not a bad outcome because the brand or operator acted in bad faith. It is a predictable outcome because one party was prepared and the other assumed the conversation itself would provide the clarity they needed to navigate it.
Why This Happens to Good Owners
The owners I have seen navigate this poorly were not careless. They were experienced in their own domain — real estate, capital markets, development, operations. They had built real assets and made real money.
What they had not done was run a structured brand and operator selection process. Because before now, no infrastructure existed to help them do that.
So they entered consequential conversations the same way most people enter them — as conversations. Questions. Dialogue. And somewhere in that dialogue, the process began, the information flowed, and the dynamics were set before anyone named them as a negotiation.
What Preparation Actually Looks Like
Preparation before a brand or operator conversation is not a longer pitch deck. It is clarity on three things.
What you know. What your project is genuinely ready for, and what is still open. What gaps exist that a brand or operator will identify quickly — and how you plan to address them on your timeline, not in response to external pressure.
What you want. Specifically. Which markets need this brand's presence to justify the fee premium — or which operator model fits your asset's operational profile and capital structure. What PIP flexibility or management fee structure matters most to your business case. Whether operational depth at the property level is more important to you than flag recognition in a specific market.
What you share, and when. Your alternatives. Your real timeline. Your flexibility on economics. These are not things to withhold permanently — both sides benefit from honest, direct conversation at the right stage. But releasing them strategically, when they add clarity rather than concede leverage, is part of running a professional process.
Owners who do this work before the first conversation arrive with a confidence that experienced brand and operator teams recognize immediately. And the proposals and term sheets that follow tend to reflect that quality of engagement.
The Conversation You Should Have First
Before you call any brand or operator, have the conversation with yourself — or with someone whose only interest is yours.
What does this project look like from the brand's perspective — or the operator's? What would they notice immediately? What would give them pause? What would make them want to prioritize this deal over the others sitting in their pipeline?
The answers to those questions are not secrets. They are knowable. And knowing them is the difference between entering a multi-decade partnership process with clarity — or entering it and discovering what you needed to know only after the conversation has already shaped the outcome.
The goal is not to be guarded. It is to be prepared. Those are very different things, and the best conversations between owners, brands, and operators happen when all parties arrive that way.
Joan Dejarden is the founder of Dealality, a confidential platform for hotel brand and operator selection, and Principal of AO Hospitality Advisors. He has worked on both sides of hotel deals across the Americas and CALA.