Cindy Estis Green ’79

Cindy Estis Green’s career began in corporate marketing and senior operations roles for Hilton International. After founding the data mining and predictive modeling analytics company, Driving Revenue, and selling it to Pegasus Solutions, Ms. Estis Green spent twelve years as managing partner of The Estis Group working with hotel owners on targeting value growth in their assets.

A prolific writer, Estis Green is co-author of several groundbreaking books including the first profile of the hospitality digital marketplace hailed by many as the bible of distribution Distribution Channel Analysis, updated several years later with Demystifying the Digital Marketplace, and a series of Special Reports profiling the rise of Social Media, legal guidelines for the digital market, brand-driven Book Direct campaigns and the Groups & Meetings market. Estis Green has been honored as one of the 25 Extraordinary Minds in Sales and Marketing by HSMAI, was one of the first women inducted into the prestigious Hospitality Technology Hall of Fame and was named as one of Cornell University’s 90 Influential Hotelies.

She launched and has subsequently been the chair of the AHLA Consumer Innovation Forum with the industry’s leading experts in digital and distribution strategy and is highly sought after as a speaker at many global forums on topics related to digital disruption and the impact on the economics of hotels.

Ms. Estis Green co-founded Kalibri Labs, a firm providing a next generation commercial strategy and benchmarking platform to evaluate and predict hotel revenue performance. Using innovative data science techniques including AI and machine learning, Kalibri Labs helps hotel owners and operators optimize profit contribution to improve asset value and supports the real estate community with the tools that refine underwriting for transactions, development and financial restructuring.

Estis Green holds a BS degree from Cornell University and an MBA from The American University.

In an interview with the Lodging Magazine on March 7, 2023:

What initially inspired you to get into the hospitality business?

I studied Human Development at Cornell but got interested in the Hotel School and changed my major when I recognized the career opportunity. I started with restaurants at Disney, then switched to hotels after my MBA for an exciting role at Hilton International to create the industry’s first marketing information systems and research function. I did that for a few years and then became a GM to see how those technology tools can be leveraged by hotels. I haven’t looked back!

Who were some of your mentors or role models, male or female, and what were their most valuable lessons?

The head of marketing at Hilton told me change will be the only constant as technology gains traction. He said, “continually embrace change in your environment and don’t ever get complacent.” My parents were equal partners in running our family business; a children’s camp and indoor tennis club. They taught me that the only limits on my aspirations are self-imposed, that is anything is in my reach. They taught me to work harder than anyone else and be open to learning new skills and I could achieve anything I set out to do. And if didn’t reach my goals that I would never regret anything having given it my all.

In your opinion, how is the lodging industry doing in terms of getting women into leadership positions?

At Kalibri Labs, I have intentionally recruited and developed our women leaders and support many in our client’s organizations to ensure they get visibility to assist in their career growth. In lodging, there is still a lot of institutional bias that has to be persistently chipped away to make real progress. Diversity has proven to yield superior economic results, but it’s a long road and we can’t let up as an industry. I applaud the many organizations and initiatives that have emerged to create forums to raise awareness through improved dialogue along with leadership and diversity training.

Cindy with Michelle Russo ’87; Kate Henriksen ’96; Andrea Foster ‘96 at Hotel Management Top 30 Women’s luncheon

Excerpt from the Hotel Business Magazine, June 2023

CHANGING THE GAME

Kalibri Labs offers insight on the digital market and commercial strategy in new book

By Gregg Wallis, Senior Editor

Left to right: Dave Roberts, Cindy Estis Green and Mark Lomanno

The pace of digital disruption in hospitality has only increased since the pandemic, with new rules and new players entering the playing field.  To help industry players keep up and, perhaps, give them an edge Kalibri Labs, inpartnership with Hotel Business, has released the latest edition of its popular “Demystifying” series of books, “Demystifying the Digital Market & Guide to Commercial Strategy,” with a look at how to gain customers in a post-COVID world and at the new challenges facing hoteliers.  “I wanted hotel industry stakeholders to be well informed about a market that is dominated by digital disruptors,” said Cindy Estis Green, CEO/cofounder, Kalibri Labs. “In a world where debt service has doubled and labor costs have spiked, if hoteliers can make commercial spending decisions through the lens of improving asset value, those owning and operating hotels can thrive.  This is the underlying premise of commercial strategy.

Growing asset value is the new North Star for managing hotel performance.”

The book captures the state of the digital market, and Estis Green has collaborated with coauthor Mark Lomanno, partner/senior advisor, Kalibri Labs, to mine data from almost 35,000 hotels to reveal revenue performance, demand metrics and trends by segment, channel, geography and chain scale across the U.S. hotel industry.  The book identifies the significant changes in the large digital technology platforms and the hotel brands, and what the implications are for hotel owners and management companies.

For this edition, Dave Roberts, professor, Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, and former SVP, revenue strategy and solutions, Marriott, has contributed to the new section on the emerging discipline of commercial strategy, which paves the way for readers to understand theurgency of measuring performance based on pro t contribution. It also offers a framework to evaluate how customer acquisition techniques can be leveraged to improve asset values and streamlined to improve efficiency in the ways hotels go to market.

Download the book here.

Green Family picture Nathaniel ’13; Micah ’18, husband Jeff (Princeton) and Samara (UNC Chapel Hill ’16)