Hotel Commission Math Is Where Most Systems Break
Neldon Mamuad watched one of the largest operators in the industry wrestle with hotel commissions for fifteen years. Then he had to solve it himself.
When Hawaii Stage moved into hotel AV, Neldon Mamuad already knew what was coming. He had spent fifteen years in this space and had seen the problem from the inside.
“Having lived it, I know it is a complex problem to solve.”
Enough that it beat the software at his last company. “I’ve seen the iterations of the back-end system, so much so that many end up building their own, and I know why.”
What breaks
Hotel commissions do not behave like rental line items. They “adjust based off of discount, based off of sliding scale,” and they change by property, by deal structure, by what got discounted and how. A single event can carry different rates on rental, on labor, on internet, and on service charges, and each one has to land correctly on an invoice a hotel finance office will scrutinize.
Storing a commission rate is easy. Calculating one that moves with the discount, the property, and the type of line it sits on is not.
Hawaii Stage was on Lasso when he arrived. “When I looked under the hood, they were using Lasso and it was all fine and dandy until we got to the hotel commission part.” But the hotel side was the reason he had been hired, and there the system wasn’t workable. “They couldn’t do the reporting and they couldn’t break off the commissions.”
A year later, when Lasso came back to try to win the business, it still could not.
Function over form
Arriving as Division President, hired to get the company’s systems in order, Neldon was not evaluating rental software in the abstract. He was looking for one specific thing.
He narrowed it to Flex and IntelliEvent Lightning, and on capability he found almost no daylight between them. “Apples to apples was pretty much the same.”
On presentation, the other system won. “I like their printable reports, the visual aspect.”
He took the one that could do the math.
Two gates
Neldon puts any new system through two tests. He calls them prongs. The first is financial: does the new system cost more, less, or about the same as what you already have. “That’s gate number one. Then number two is the functionality. Is it going to save me more in productivity and functionality than your current solution.”
For Flex, the second gate closed before the first was even settled. “To me, the functionality was already checked with Flex because of the commission.”
The financial gate came first in his framework, but it did not decide the outcome. “Even if the financial was a little more, it would still not negate the productivity gains.”
That is what it looks like when someone has already lived the problem. The evaluation is short, because the requirement is not negotiable and they know it before the demo starts.
Built to his model, not ours
Knowing the problem meant knowing exactly what the fix had to look like, down to the wording.
Hawaii Stage charges a service fee on equipment on the hotel side of the business only. Neldon did not want it printed as a service charge. On his quotes it reads Event Technology Support, ETS, because that is the language his hotel clients use. He also specified that ETS be commissionable in its own right, and taxable. Warehouse inventory and hotel inventory had to be visible separately, so each side of the house sees only its own.
None of that is a feature request. It is an operator translating a business he already understood into a system.
Then they checked our work
A configuration is a claim until someone tests it against a real invoice.
Neldon had not handed his staff to us to train. He brought in Justin Gushikuma, now Director of Event Technology for their Waikiki complex and a colleague he had worked with before, and the two of them learned the system alongside Jacob, their Flex onboarding lead, until they could teach it themselves. “Me and Justin, and we became the internal SMEs, and we trained the staff.”
A few months after go-live, Justin went through a production invoice line by line and came back with a question. The ETS charge looked like it was being commissioned twice, and the total did not match what their other invoices were doing. He wanted the difference accounted for.
That is the part most implementations skip. Trusting the output is how a commission error survives for a year. Hawaii Stage checked, because the two people who configured the system were the same two who understood what the number was supposed to be.
What the job looks like now
Neldon had just finished writing a fourteen-page order when we spoke, and the thing he named as his aha moment was not the commission engine.
“The aha moment is being able to do bulk moves.”
He had spent years moving line items one at a time. “Like, one, one, one, instead of grabbing the group and just moving it. Shit like that, that’s a time suck.”
It sounds small. It is not, for him, because the document is the product. “I’m very OCD in my orders. I want it to look perfect.”
Who picks up when it breaks
Ask him what has kept Hawaii Stage on Flex and he does not name a capability. “It was the ability to get access to the time to get the answers.”
He splits it the way you would split medical care. “There’s some things I go to my general PCP for, and there’s some things I got to talk to the specialist about, right?” For the specialist problems, what he wants is “somebody that knows my business, somebody that knows what I’ve gone through.”
He knows the alternative well. “I’d put in a ticket, I’d get an automated response, I’d wait for a response.” What he gets instead is a call with a person who knows his configuration. “I’m gonna get a human body at 6 o’clock.”
He spent fifteen years learning exactly how this breaks. What he wanted from a vendor was someone who would not need it explained to him twice.