The 2025–2026 cycle has settled an old argument. The GOP squeeze hospitality lived through last year was not a temporary anomaly but a structural reset in hotel operating economics. ADR alone will not restore margins. Capital is tighter, labor costs have outpaced revenue growth since 2019, and the middle layer of management that many of us relied on for the last twenty years thinned out in the pandemic and has not come back.
In that environment, the test of a managing director is no longer how much you can delegate, but what you keep on your own desk. There are three things I have never delegated in any mandate, in any country, regardless of the size of the team underneath me. Not because no one else is capable, but because the moment you delegate them, you stop being the managing director.
1. The cash discipline
Not the books—those belong to the controller. Not the strategy—that belongs to ownership. The cash discipline: what gets paid, what gets collected, what gets purchased, when, to whom and on what terms.
Cash is the lifeblood of the business. A hotel can show a healthy P&L for months while losing the ability to operate. I learned this running airline catering, where receivables stretch with carrier payment cycles, and again in an insolvency proceeding, where every payable was a negotiation. The managing director who delegates cash discipline loses the only daily signal of asset health that is not lagging.
This does not mean signing every invoice. It means setting the policy, owning the weekly cash conversation, knowing the ageing of receivables and making the call when a payment must be deferred or accelerated. Two years ago, I sat with a CFO who told me proudly that his GM had not looked at the cash report in eight months. The hotel was in trouble three months later.
2. The labor relationship
I do not mean HR processes—those belong to the HR director. I mean the relationship with the workforce as a body: the works council, the unions, the informal interlocutors on the shop floor who set the temperature of the operation.
This is more important in 2026, not less. Younger workers expect authentic leadership and visible commitment to fairness. The mid-level manager pipeline is thinner than it was in 2019. Labor cost is the largest controllable expense in most P&Ls and is rising faster than revenue.
I negotiated a restructuring of the workforce in airline catering. I resolved an indefinite hotel strike under insolvency by sitting down face-to-face in good faith with the strike committee and repairing the broken conversation. In both cases, what made the difference was that I was the one in the room. Not a representative. Not a labor lawyer. The managing director.
The team needs to see you at the moments that matter: when a decision is hard, when somebody needs to take responsibility, when the answer is no and the ‘no’ has to be explained. Delegating these signals to the workforce that the asset has no real owner of the relationship. Once that signal sets in, it is very hard to reverse.
3. The spokesperson to ownership
The third is the one most often quietly delegated, and the one whose delegation I find least defensible.
Ownership is not the same as the corporate office. Ownership is the people or entities whose capital is at risk in the asset. They have a right to a clear, honest, unmediated voice from the person they have entrusted with the operation. That spokesperson is the managing director.
Capital is tighter in 2026 than it was eighteen months ago. Owners are asking harder questions about CapEx, about labor productivity, about the timing of returns. The MD who lets the financial controller, the asset manager or a deck prepared by someone three levels down carry that conversation has surrendered something fundamental. Ownership needs to hear the operational judgment coming from the operator, including the things that are uncomfortable to say.
Three CFO mandates I held with Meliá Hotels International in Cuba, Lanzarote and Cabo Verde taught me this from the financial side. Properties whose general managers carried their own number to the JV partner board received support when they needed it. Properties whose GMs hid behind intermediaries got what they had asked for, which was usually less than what they actually needed.
What’s free to delegate
A confident managing director delegates widely and trusts the people they have hired. But cash discipline, the labor relationship and the spokesperson to ownership are not three more items on a delegation list. They are the three places where the managing director’s signature must be visible—to the bank, to the workforce and to the owner. If those three are clear, almost anything below can be redesigned, replaced or restructured without losing the asset. If any of those three is delegated, the asset has no managing director, regardless of who holds the title.
The 2026 reset is forcing the industry to relearn this distinction. The MDs who come out of this cycle stronger will not be the ones who delegated the most. They will be the ones who know—with absolute clarity—what could not leave their own desk.
Juan R. Sánchez-Harguindey is a consultant and senior director at Harguindey Hospitality Consulting. He has held managing director and CFO mandates in hospitality, airline catering, leisure parks and industrial services across Spain, Mexico, Cuba and Cabo Verde.