What Eight Years in a Hotel Taught Me About Running a Business

Written by Pedro Reis, Founder of Guesture

Quick Summary

Before Guesture, Pedro Reis spent eight years managing a four-star hotel in Crickhowell. For some of those years, he was simultaneously running short-term rentals in his own time — without pay, reinvesting everything back in. This article explains what that dual experience taught him about standards, accountability, and the difference between hospitality that holds and hospitality that fails — and why that knowledge is the foundation every Guesture owner relies on today.

What This Article Covers

- What eight years managing a four-star hotel in Wales actually teaches you about hospitality

- Why Pedro Reis ran short-term rentals unpaid for six years before going full-time with Guesture

- How hotel management thinking shapes every aspect of the Guesture operating standard today

- Why this background is the reason Guesture holds Plum Guide and Marriott Homes and Villas accreditation

Before Guesture, I managed a four-star hotel in Crickhowell.

The Manor Hotel. Boutique, independent, AA Rosette kitchen. The kind of property where the standard is set by the people inside it rather than by a brand manual sent from a head office somewhere else.

I spent eight years there. For about two of those years, I was simultaneously running short-term rental properties in my own time — not for income, but to understand the model from the inside. To learn what distinguished a property that guests remembered from one they simply tolerated. To develop the operational knowledge that I knew I would eventually need if I was going to build something in this space properly.

I was not paid for that second role. Everything I earned from it went back in. That was a deliberate decision.

What Hotel Management Actually Teaches You

Running a hotel is an education in consequence. When a guest has a poor experience, the feedback is immediate and personal. There is no algorithm between you and the outcome. You are in the building. You own the result.

That environment teaches you that the standard is either held by the person responsible or it is not held at all. It teaches you that the difference between a four-star experience and a three-star experience is rarely one dramatic failure — it is the accumulation of small decisions made consistently or inconsistently over time. It teaches you that hospitality, at its best, is invisible. When everything is right, the guest does not notice the operation. They simply feel looked after.

It also teaches you what it costs to get it wrong. A bad review travels fast and compounds. A management failure that is not caught early becomes a pattern. A relationship with a guest that starts on the wrong note rarely recovers.

I carried all of that into Guesture.

Why the Background Matters for Owners

When a property owner works with Guesture, they are not working with a property management company that learned this industry from an app. They are working with someone who spent years in a professional hospitality environment before the short-term rental sector existed in its current form.

That means the Plum Guide accreditation is not a marketing credential — it is the outcome of applying a hospitality assessment framework to short-term rental management and finding that the standard holds. It means the Marriott Homes and Villas partnership is not a listing platform — it is a quality threshold that a property either meets or does not.

It means that when I tell an owner their property needs work before it is ready for the Guesture portfolio, I am not being difficult. I am applying the same judgment I developed over eight years in a building where the standard had to be met every day, regardless of how inconvenient that was.

What I Am Building Toward

Guesture is not a large company. It is not trying to be. The model I built is deliberately personal, deliberately selective, and deliberately rooted in the kind of hospitality thinking that does not scale easily.

I built it this way because I have seen what happens when this industry scales without that foundation. The properties underperform. The owners are disappointed. The guests are let down. And the person who should be accountable is not reachable.

That is not what I built. And it is not what I am going to build.