You open a date two months later. You see that you lowered the rate from €86 to €78 and that the night closed at 35 rooms. Nothing else. You do not remember whether pace was soft, whether you had competitor rates, what the screen was telling you that evening. And without those, the two numbers teach you nothing at all.
The “why” is the first thing to go
Memory does not erase the decision. It erases the reasons for it — and then, politely, rebuilds them from what you know today. If the night went well, you remember someone who saw it coming; if it went badly, you remember someone who panicked. Neither version is necessarily what happened.
This is not a personal weakness. It is how memory works for everyone, and it gets worse the more certain you feel. The way out is not to remember better. It is to not need to remember.
What is frozen the moment you record
On the day card, next to the rate, there is a form with three choices: Followed, Different rate, No action. “Followed” appears only when there is a suggestion to follow — otherwise it would mean nothing. When you press one of the three, the decision is not saved on its own. It is saved together with the context of the moment:
- the pace of the date and how full it already was
- how many days were left until arrival
- whether the date was a holiday or a local event — for a hotel in Greece the app fills in public holidays by itself; everything else you enter
- your rate and the ARI of the date — the index built from the competitor rates you had recorded
- the suggestion — and the reason written under it
The last one is the most important and the easiest to skip. A suggestion without its basis is an opinion; six months later, an opinion you cannot trace back cannot be judged. With its basis, you know whether at the time the tool had twelve similar nights to go on or three, and whether it had a comp set or not.
Two things the record does not do: it does not change a rate anywhere by itself, and it does not talk to your PMS. The decision goes into the Rate Sheet only by your hand, and from there you pass it on to your channel manager. It is a note, not a command.
The outcome arrives by itself
When you record the decision, the outcome field is empty — rightly, because the night has not happened yet. It fills in later, when the night auditor records that night: occupancy, average rate, revenue. And if the night is corrected afterwards, the outcome is recalculated; the old one is not left hanging.
Let us see what the pair shows in our example. A 47-room hotel, mid-season, twenty days before the date: 22 rooms already booked at €86, too few similar past nights for the app to suggest a cut, so the suggestion is “Hold”. The manager lowered the rate to €78. The night closed at 35 rooms.
13 rooms × €78 = €1,014
Night revenue: €2,906 · ADR €83.03
Contribution after the €14 CPOR:
22 × €72 + 13 × €64 = €2,416
Same contribution without the cut: 2,416 ÷ 72 = 33.6 rooms
So the cut came out ahead only if, without it, the night would have closed at 33 rooms or fewer
Two rooms. That was the whole bet. And the question “how many would have booked without the cut?” is never answered, by anyone, with any tool — the same night does not exist in a second version. Note also that CPOR is the variable cost of the room and does not include commission: what each sold night really leaves depends on its channel.
Why there is no tick and no cross
It would be easy to put a green mark next to the decisions that “worked”. It would look useful and it would be a lie. To say that a decision worked, you need to compare it with what would have happened without it — and that exists nowhere, because it did not happen. A “✓ worked” would be invention with a straight face.
So the report puts the decision and the outcome side by side and stops there. The judgement is yours, with what you knew at the time in front of you. It is less satisfying than a score and much more useful, because it lets you see the real lesson: not “I got it wrong”, but “I decided on three similar nights and did not notice”.
Notice, though, what the outcome is, even when it is complete: occupancy, average rate, revenue. How good the guests’ night was does not fit in that line, and a full night can still be a bad night in every other way.
Did you know? WisDom RM does not score your decisions, and it does not score people. It keeps what you decided, what you knew when you decided it, and what happened afterwards — all three on the same line.
Try it free for 14 days →Where you see it again
The decisions you recorded during the month come together in the Monthly Report, in their own section, night by night: the last decision for each room type — and, if you changed your mind along the way, the whole path of it — with the outcome of the night written once. The nights fall into three groups: those with an outcome, those that passed without being recorded, and those still to come. A small detail, with the same logic as everything else: a night that passed without a record shows as a gap; it does not drop off the list. A hidden gap is worse than a visible one.
In practice this section is read once a month, in ten minutes, and it answers a question that otherwise has no answer: what kind of decisions do I make when the data is thin?
Conclusion
A decision log does not make you a better manager because it checks on you. It makes you better because it hands back, untouched, what your memory would already have rewritten. The next time you look at a soft date and feel the pull of a discount, you will not be guessing whether it worked last time. You will have in front of you what you knew then, what you did and how it ended — and you will decide. The tool keeps the minutes. It does not keep score.
Mathematician with studies in hospitality management and years of night shifts in hotels. WisDom RM — and this blog — were born on the night shift.
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