Behind the Stays

Heidi Zimmer closed on her construction financing the day before the country shut down in March of 2020.

Then lumber tripled. She had to cut an entire building from the plan. And the business she'd underwritten, roughly seventy-five percent group retreats and twenty-five percent leisure, opened in 2021 and flipped almost exactly upside down.

Heidi has spent more than thirty years in real estate development, much of it building artist housing and creative spaces around the country. Wild Rice Retreat sits on a hundred and fourteen acres of dense forest on a seventy-foot sandstone cliff above Lake Superior in Bayfield, Wisconsin, about as far north as you can go in this country. The land was once home to a James Beard-nominated restaurant designed by the architect David Salmela. Heidi took one look at it and knew it needed to become a place for healing. She brought Salmela back and built a thirty-one-room retreat that blends Scandinavian and Native American traditions.

What makes Wild Rice so interesting is what Heidi refuses to do. Everyone tells her she needs a pickleball court, Pilates reformers and the latest gadget. She tunes all of it out. There's no menu: food is simply out from ten to noon and five to seven, because guests, especially moms, arrive with so much decision fatigue that not having to choose is the wellness. And every day includes a creativity class, because, as Heidi puts it, in the Native American tradition there's no word for artist. To be human is to be an artist.

In this episode, recorded live at the Independent Hotel Show in Miami with my co-host Ben, we get into her three pillars of nourishment, expression and movement. We get into the twenty-five million dollar expansion that adds seventeen owned homes to the rental pool, and the Nordic spa she's building with a glass-front sauna facing Lake Superior. We talk about why same-week bookings are way up, and why she thinks trees are the most underrated wellness modality there is.

Her father used to say there's no problem a good long walk in the woods can't solve. Heidi built a business on it.

 

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Scott Eddy — Global Travel & Hospitality Expert @MrScottEddy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrscotteddy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrscotteddy/

The full squad is back. Royal Caribbean is taking a 50% stake in Sandals Resorts for roughly $3 billion, and the crew breaks down why a cruise line wants an all-inclusive hotel brand. Edwin runs the numbers on who is really serving whose guests, and Scott, who has known the Stewart family most of his life, explains why cruise companies can't build ships fast enough and are coming ashore instead.

Then it's Airbnb's hotel push: just shy of 4,000 hotels on the new listing format, hand-curated and aimed at independent and soft-brand three- and four-star properties. Ben weighs in as an operator who knows the platform well, and Edwin asks what happens to hotels when short-term rental markets get squeezed. From there, Uber's hotel business: Dara Khosrowshahi says the traveler comes to Uber, Uber One has more than 50 million paying members, and the Blacklane deal hints at where a trip super app could go.

The closer: at Skift's first creator summit, IHG and Hyatt said they're giving up control of scripted creator campaigns. Scott says it's six years too late. Ben says social is now the best customer acquisition channel on the planet, and any brand that won't invest in it is choosing to hand its bookings to the OTAs. Plus spice of the week, from an Ibiza rave revival to the difference between building a brand and putting heads in beds.

 

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Scott Eddy — Global Travel & Hospitality Expert @MrScottEddy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrscotteddy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrscotteddy/

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

Edwin Kramer — Luxury Hotelier Consultant & Former GM
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinckramer/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edwinkramer/

Check out Lodgify claim your exclusive discount: https://www.lodgify.com/behind-the-stays/

Femme House website: https://stayfemmehouse.com/

Femme House on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/femmehouseaz/

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Vanessa Aguirre was in her bridal era when the idea for Femme House found her. A disappointing experience with her own wedding venue, a travel blogger's eye for what makes a stay shareable, and a hunch that bachelorettes deserved better than what Nashville was offering. So in 2020, with travel stopped, weddings cancelled, and everyone telling her she was crazy, she and her husband Jake bought a house in Nashville and painted it pink.

It worked immediately. Bookings poured in from day one (her first mistake: pricing too low), and within a month the goal became property number two in Scottsdale, the country's second-largest bachelorette market. 

 

Today Femme House runs three properties across the two cities, each designed around one guest: the bride. Heart-shaped mini golf, beauty bars built for getting ready together, a shimmer wall that saves every group the $800 they would spend renting one. Every detail has to be both functional and scroll-stopping.

In this episode, Vanessa gets into the strategy behind the aesthetic: why picking one avatar beats appealing to everyone, why "copy the top-performing house" is the worst advice in short-term rental investing, how Nashville and Scottsdale bachelorettes behave completely differently, and how the communal "take a penny, leave a penny" decor culture became part of the brand. She also shares the Airbnb suspension scare, triggered by a neighbor's New Year's Eve fireworks, that pushed her into direct booking, first reluctantly and then happily with Lodgify.

Her advice for anyone building a themed stay: go all the way in.

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Behind the Stays is brought to you by Journey — a first-of-its-kind loyalty program that brings together an alliance of the world’s top independently owned and operated stays and allows travelers to earn points and perks on boutique hotels, vacation rentals, treehouses, ski chalets, glamping experiences and so much more.

 

Your host is Zach Busekrus, Head of Growth at Journey. If you are a hospitality entrepreneur who has a stay, or a collection of stays with soul, we’d love for you to apply to join our Alliance at journey.com/alliance.

Fresh off Independent Hotel Show Miami, Zach and Ben break down two days of conversations with eight owners, operators, and investors from across independent hospitality.
Before the full interviews roll out on This Week in Hospitality, this is the recap — the ideas that kept surfacing across every mic session, the moments that caught us off guard, and what these conversations say about where independent hospitality is actually headed.

Whether you own a property, back one, or build for the people who do, consider this your shortcut to what the industry's sharpest independents are thinking right now.

 

 

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Scott Eddy — Global Travel & Hospitality Expert @MrScottEddy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrscotteddy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrscotteddy/

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

Edwin Kramer — Luxury Hotelier Consultant & Former GM
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinckramer/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edwinkramer/

Check out Lake.com claim your exclusive discount: https://www.lake.com/partners/behind-the-stays

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Every few weeks, someone emails me a vision for a stay they want to build. Edoardo is one of the rare ones who actually went and built it.

Before Nature Nooks, he was a startup co-founder and product manager who'd done a stint as a senior program manager at Dollar Shave Club. Then he walked away from tech, bought seventeen acres of raw land in Sullivan, Maine, and — in a single summer — stood up a glamping retreat of three Scandinavian cabins and two mirrored domes.

What makes his story worth studying is the tension running through it. Edoardo approached this like a real estate investor and a project manager, the kind of operator who builds a hundred-row spreadsheet of cabin suppliers and works a glamping trade show with a pen before breaking ground. And yet what he built is anything but clinical — every unit is named after the night sky and, at the same time, after a woman in his family, from Gaia for his grandmother to Vesta, the Roman goddess of home and hospitality, for his mother.

In this episode, we get into the decisions a lot of you keep asking me about. Why he chose Maine over the obvious glamping markets like Colorado or Arizona, and how regulations, cost, and proximity to Acadia National Park all factored in. Why he landed in Sullivan rather than Bar Harbor proper, and how sitting between the two halves of Acadia became a feature rather than a compromise. Why the local regional bank understood his forecast when the big national banks kept saying no — and how a ping pong event had something to do with it. How he's testing not just unit types but the amenities inside them, from telescopes to tubs to which dome gets the early reviews. And why he's deliberately holding his ADR below market in year one and treating it as a marketing expense, optimizing for occupancy, reviews, and learnings over short-term rate.

It's a masterclass in doing your homework and then actually jumping — and a reminder that the difference between the people who email me an idea and the people who build something real usually comes down to whether they were willing to figure the rest out along the way.

https://naturenooksacadia.com 

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Behind the Stays is brought to you by Journey — a first-of-its-kind loyalty program that brings together an alliance of the world’s top independently owned and operated stays and allows travelers to earn points and perks on boutique hotels, vacation rentals, treehouses, ski chalets, glamping experiences and so much more.

 

Your host is Zach Busekrus, Head of Growth at Journey. If you are a hospitality entrepreneur who has a stay, or a collection of stays with soul, we’d love for you to apply to join our Alliance at journey.com/alliance.

Blake Danner has spent his career inside the rooms where lifestyle hospitality was invented. Eleven years alongside Ian Schrager opening the Clift, Sanderson, and Shore Club. Seven years as founding COO of the Sydell Group, where he helped create Nomad, The Line, and Freehand — 11 hotels in seven years. A stint running operations at Proper Hospitality. And now, as COO of AKA Hotels & Hotel Residences, he's running a 16-property luxury serviced residence portfolio where the entry-level monthly rate starts at $30K and the loyalty program charges $750 just to join.

This week, Blake makes the case that the mid-size independent operator isn't just surviving — it's winning. He explains why he's "completely unhireable" by big brands, what he learned from Schrager about staying culturally voracious, and the Andrew Zobler lesson he still carries: never sacrifice brand DNA, no matter how big the check. He tells the Delano pool story — suits outnumbering swimsuits — and why the Nomad once turned down a million-dollar group that wanted a banner over the front desk.

Then the crew digs into Skift's latest loyalty data showing credit cards and banks now outrank hotels as the most rewarding loyalty programs in the eyes of travelers. Blake's response: boo hoo. If your product is good enough, people will skip the points. The conversation turns to Neil Jacobs' new operating company backed by Constellation Hotels — his pitch for a "third way" between global management scale and solo passion projects. Blake co-signs the thesis and adds: AKA doesn't want 50 properties, and that restraint is the whole point.

Stream The Hotel Daddy Podcast
Follow Blake on Instagram
Connect with Blake on LinkedIn

 

 

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Scott Eddy — Global Travel & Hospitality Expert @MrScottEddy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrscotteddy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrscotteddy/

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

Edwin Kramer — Luxury Hotelier Consultant & Former GM
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinckramer/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edwinkramer/

Check out Lodgify claim your exclusive discount: https://www.lodgify.com/behind-the-stays/ 

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In just a moment you'll meet Austin Allison — co-founder and CEO of Pacaso, the co-ownership platform that's reimagining how people buy, use, and think about second homes.

Austin's dad was a carpenter. They lived paycheck to paycheck in a home with unfinished plywood floors because they couldn't afford carpet. Austin started working job sites with his dad at six or seven years old, and the thing it taught him wasn't carpentry — it was that you can build anything if you decide to. By 17, he'd saved up four thousand dollars, bought a bank foreclosure, and watched the listing agent walk away from the closing table with a check that changed how he thought about money. A week after turning 18, he was enrolled in real estate school.

That trajectory led to Dot Loop — a platform Austin built while simultaneously attending law school that went on to power more than half of all digital real estate transactions in the US — and eventually a sale to Zillow, where he worked alongside Spencer Rascoff and the founding team. But the Pacaso idea actually started earlier, back in 2013, when Austin bought a second home in Lake Tahoe and realized he hadn't just purchased a piece of real estate. He'd purchased a second life.

In this conversation, Austin walks us through the full arc — from selling birdhouses as a kid to building a unicorn in five months, what it felt like to lay off nearly 300 people when the market turned, and why the six months after selling Dot Loop were some of the lowest of his life. We get into the mechanics of co-ownership, how it's fundamentally different from timeshares, and this new product called Infinity that's unlocking the 80% of luxury second homes around the world that sit empty because owners don't want renters — but would happily swap with other owners. And he makes this point that I keep coming back to — that the people stuck on the hamster wheel aren't the ones who can't afford the life they want. They're the ones who haven't made the decision yet.

—

 

Behind the Stays is brought to you by Journey — a first-of-its-kind loyalty program that brings together an alliance of the world’s top independently owned and operated stays and allows travelers to earn points and perks on boutique hotels, vacation rentals, treehouses, ski chalets, glamping experiences and so much more.

 

Your host is Zach Busekrus, Head of Growth at Journey. If you are a hospitality entrepreneur who has a stay, or a collection of stays with soul, we’d love for you to apply to join our Alliance at journey.com/alliance.

TikTok Go was supposed to turn creators into a hotel distribution channel. Instead, a Skift investigation found dozens of AI-generated fake videos attached to real properties — fabricated suites, nonexistent amenities, faceless accounts — with one Sedona luxury resort racking up 17 flagged videos. The kicker: the hotel doesn't even sell through TikTok Go's booking partners. Scott says forget the AI part — someone can now recommend a hotel they've never visited, show rooms that don't exist, and disappear while the property deals with the fallout.

Then Airbnb quietly drops the most telling number of the year — testing reduced host fees as low as 6% when hosts drive their own bookings. Ben does the math: Airbnb just told you demand generation is worth nine points of margin. The host does the marketing. Airbnb keeps the customer. Edwin rattles off a staggering list of global STR bans and argues this is less generosity than regulatory hedging.

And Google rolls out hotel bookings inside AI mode. Edwin delivers the sharpest take: hotels get the booking, but Google keeps the reason they booked. Discovery, intent, the "why" — all inside Google's walled garden. Hotels become the fulfillment layer.

Plus: Marriott bets big on the NFL, Booking.com lets a fake 10 Downing Street listing stay live for six weeks, and Scott closes with a rant the industry needs to hear — hospitality has a technology obsession and a people problem.

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Scott Eddy — Global Travel & Hospitality Expert @MrScottEddy
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrscotteddy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrscotteddy/

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

Edwin Kramer — Luxury Hotelier Consultant & Former GM
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinckramer/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edwinkramer/

Check out Lodgify claim your exclusive discount: https://www.lodgify.com/behind-the-stays/ 

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In just a moment you'll meet Lauren Blanford from Lost Woods — a glamping retreat and event property built on 160 acres of northern Michigan that started with two bell tents, a porta potty, and homemade bagels hand-delivered at sunrise.

Lauren and her husband Jason were living in Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood, raising young kids, feeling like two ships passing in the night. They put their condo up for sale, found a property they wanted to buy, and were ready to make the leap. Then COVID hit — the exact week the world shut down. The condo had already sold. The other deal fell through. Everything they owned was in storage. They had no home and no plan B.

So they started over. The original vision had been an event barn, but gatherings weren't happening anymore. They shifted gears, came up to northern Michigan on vacation, and found 160 acres of land with views that took their breath away. They bought it and started building something from scratch — slowly, deliberately, with whatever resources they had left.

What's happened since is one of the more compelling small-scale hospitality stories I've come across. Lauren walks us through how guest feedback reshaped her entire business model — from glamping stays to themed retreats that now drive almost everything. Reading retreats that sell out instantly. A romance novel retreat built around a bookstore that opened in their tiny town. Mother-daughter camps that filled in a day. A perimenopause retreat that was born from a literal conversation at the dinner table during a previous retreat. We talk about the decision to close the business Monday through Thursday this summer so she could actually be present with her kids, how she went from fully dependent on Airbnb to 95% direct bookings and what that did for her cash flow and her sanity, and this idea she keeps coming back to — that the real growth opportunity for operators like her isn't more units. It's more reasons for people to show up.

—

 

Behind the Stays is brought to you by Journey — a first-of-its-kind loyalty program that brings together an alliance of the world’s top independently owned and operated stays and allows travelers to earn points and perks on boutique hotels, vacation rentals, treehouses, ski chalets, glamping experiences and so much more.

 

Your host is Zach Busekrus, Head of Growth at Journey. If you are a hospitality entrepreneur who has a stay, or a collection of stays with soul, we’d love for you to apply to join our Alliance at journey.com/alliance.

Hotel sales in the US are up 28% in the first half of 2026 — and a meaningful chunk of that activity is chasing bad Yelp reviews, not trophy assets. JMI Realty executive Drew Bridges joins the show to break down how his firm is using AI to source acquisition targets off terrible guest feedback. The specific deal: a Hilton Garden Inn in Austin bought for $100K per key that reviewers called "janky" and "a complete nightmare." Drew walks through the renovation math, why he's keeping the brand, and why only 184 of 789 US submarkets have outpaced CPI since 2019 — a stat that underpins his thesis that a massive basis reset is underway across the industry.

Then the crew digs into Rafat Ali's latest column arguing that independent boutique brands have effectively become the outsourced R&D labs of the global flags. Graduate, Nomad, Standard International, Ace, CitizenM — all absorbed in the last two years. Edwin pushes back: maybe the right size for a great independent brand is just smaller than anyone wants to admit. Scott says 95% of what the public hotel companies do is shareholder theater. Ben says the Edition model — bring in a founder, protect the brand — is the playbook nobody's replicated.

Spice of the week: Scott on Google's move toward agentic hotel booking and what it means for distribution. Zach on United's cinematic route reveal and the coming shift from performance marketing to storytelling. Ben on why the real risk isn't a failed bet — it's doing nothing in an industry full of dinosaurs.

 

About the Guest: Drew Bridges

Drew Bridges joined JMI Realty in 2011 as a Financial Analyst, where he underwrote new development, acquisition, and financing opportunities. Today he leads Investment Management for JMI's developed assets, overseeing property management, implementing capital expenditure and value enhancement strategies, and managing investor relations.

A graduate of Cornell University, Mr. Bridges began his career at Archon Group in Dallas, where he worked on initiatives ranging from the acquisition of non-performing loan portfolios to the spin-off of what became Pillar Hotels and Resorts.

Drew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewbridges/

 

Your Hosts:

Zach Busekrus — Journey

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

 

Scott Eddy — Global Travel & Hospitality Expert @MrScottEddy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrscotteddy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrscotteddy/

 

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

 

Edwin Kramer — Luxury Hotelier Consultant & Former GM

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinckramer/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edwinkramer/