Service as a strategy: How to drive more revenue with frontline staff
November 12, 2025
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Geoffrey Toffetti, CEO of Frontline Performance Group, a company serving nearly 3,000 hotels across major brands worldwide. Starting his career as a hotel valet and working through front desk and night audit, Geoffrey brings frontline experience to technology innovation. His platform combines learning management, analytics, and AI-driven coaching to help front desk agents increase upsells while improving service scores. From agents earning $100,000 annually to transforming skeptical veterans into top sellers, Geoffrey proves that investing in frontline performance creates wins for guests, employees, hotels, and owners alike.
In this episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens, CMO of Revinate, sits down with Geoffrey Toffetti, CEO of Frontline Performance Group, whose journey from hotel valet to technology CEO uniquely positions him to solve one of hospitality's most overlooked opportunities. After working his way through front desk, night audit, and hotel management at TradeWinds Resort in St. Pete Beach, Florida, Geoffrey spent over a decade in technology startups before bringing his dual expertise to hospitality in 2011. Today, his company serves nearly 3,000 hotels across every major brand, transforming how frontline teams drive revenue while enhancing guest experiences.
What you'll learn:
- The service-sales connection: How reframing upselling as service rather than sales helps front desk agents see they're solving guest problems, not pushing products, leading to simultaneous increases in both revenue and service scores.
- TRevPAR over RevPAR: Why measuring total revenue per available room instead of just rooms revenue provides owners with better insights for integrating food and beverage, front desk, and reservations into one cohesive ancillary revenue strategy.
- Incremental daily revenue benchmarking: How Geoffrey's proprietary IDR metric normalizes for price and occupancy, allowing luxury resorts and mid-scale airport hotels to be compared fairly, helping portfolios identify which properties sell most effectively for their opportunity.
- Closing the training loop: Why most hotel training fails because companies check a box without measuring if learning actually improved performance, and how connecting learning management systems directly to revenue analytics solves this problem.
- The discretionary effort framework: How recognition, financial reward, and accountability unlock the difference between doing just enough to avoid being fired and giving maximum effort as the best possible employee.
- Agentic AI for personalized coaching: How artificial intelligence diagnoses specific skill deficits across dozens of dimensions, then prescribes tailored video training and manager actions for each employee's unique performance gaps at scale.
- From order takers to revenue makers: Why front desk agents earning $100,000 annually through incentive-based upselling elevates the role from entry-level to mid-level, reducing turnover and creating virtuous cycles of engagement and performance.
- Service beyond conversations: Why exceptional guest experience encompasses everything from parking lot cleanliness to website functionality, not just the people directly speaking with guests, and how this holistic view transforms operations.
Together, Karen and Geoffrey discuss expanding into food and beverage across 8,000 restaurants in their hotel portfolio, why frontline employees are the future leaders of your company, and how in markets with RevPAR headwinds, your people become your true differentiator over decor and amenities.
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Episode Highlights
[06:44] Sales and service as two sides of the same coin - Geoffrey explains his philosophy: "When you're selling something and you're trying to sell them something they don't need, that's sales. If you're trying to provide a solution to a problem they have, that's service." He describes how a family with teenagers trailing behind them, checking into a double room, genuinely benefits from a suite or adjoining rooms, making the upsell an act of service, not manipulation.
[11:06] Why TRevPAR beats RevPAR - "RevPAR stands for revenue per available room. We actually don't prefer RevPAR. We prefer TRevPAR, total revenue per available room," Geoffrey explains. By measuring all hotel revenue instead of just rooms, properties can integrate front desk, food and beverage, and other revenue centers into one strategic approach, similar to how theme parks measure per capita guest spending.
[14:01] Agentic AI diagnosing performance gaps - Geoffrey describes their breakthrough technology: "If you're a front desk agent and you have a lot of upsells but your average rate is $30, and you have someone else that doesn't do very many but their average rate is $200, you can infer what's wrong. One is selling a one-tier product they're comfortable with. The other is only selling the highest-end suites." The AI diagnoses these opposite problems and prescribes different training for each employee at scale.
[17:13] The training paradox solved - "Most companies struggle to evaluate whether training worked or not," Geoffrey notes. Because their platform combines learning management and performance analytics in the same data structure, they close the loop that most training programs leave open, monitoring whether recommended videos actually improve specific skill deficits.
[22:02] The 42-year transformation story - Geoffrey shares how a cynical front desk veteran at an iconic New York luxury hotel crossed his arms during their first session until realizing upselling was actually service: "He said, 'For 42 years I've been doing a disservice to my guests because I haven't been educating them on what their alternatives are.' He became the number one seller in the hotel and more than doubled his income." This story captures the mindset shift that drives results.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:47 - Geoffrey's journey from valet to technology CEO
05:07 - Sales as a service philosophy
11:06 - TRevPAR and new revenue measurement metrics
14:01 - Agentic AI and closing the training loop
19:03 - The discretionary effort framework
22:02 - The 42-year veteran's transformation story
24:12 - Expanding into food and beverage
26:05 - Service as a holistic guest experience
28:00 - Why frontline staff are your brand differentiator
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here.
Hotel Moment Podcast is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so
Previous guests include: Shannon Knapp, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World (LHW), Patrick Norton of Brittain Resorts & Hotels, Shawn Jereb of Montage International, Carlo Del Mistro, Chief Digital Officer of Ennismore, Jason Pirock of Springboard Hospitality, and many more.
Are you a hospitality industry leader with insights to share? We're always looking for innovative voices to join our conversation about the future of hospitality technology.
If you'd like to be a guest on an upcoming episode of Hotel Moment, we'd love to hear from you! Our podcast reaches thousands of hospitality professionals worldwide, and we're particularly interested in perspectives on:
- Innovation in hospitality technology
- Guest experience transformation
- Revenue optimization strategies
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