Global luxury hotel group
The situation
Mandarin Oriental had invested in $300K Deloitte strategy decks for digital transformation and hired premium agencies for the core website and booking engine. The foundation worked. But then every new feature request came with six-figure quotes and six-month timelines. 35 hotels globally needed constant iteration — campaigns, localization, property-specific tools — and the agency model couldn't keep pace.
The strategy existed. Nobody could execute it at the speed hospitality moves.
I founded League to bridge that gap — a consultancy that could turn consultant-quality strategy into working products across the full technology stack hotels run on.
What I found
The gap was between what headquarters designed and what properties needed. Corporate wanted brand consistency. Hotels wanted local flexibility. Revenue wanted optimization. Marketing wanted campaigns. IT wanted stability. Everyone was right. Nobody was aligned.
The work wasn't one product — it was everything. Booking engine, website, revenue management software, HRIS, their online magazine, vendor management, marketing tools. Plus prototyping and market-testing new concepts: iPads on property, loyalty programs, consumer-grade interfaces for backend systems that marketing teams couldn't figure out.
Hotels in 13 languages across 50+ countries. Each property slightly different. Agencies were structurally incapable of that kind of ongoing, fragmented iteration.
How I worked
League was lean — 5 core people, scaling up to 39 for specific projects. Not a traditional agency. More like an embedded product practice that could flex.
Worked directly with property teams, marketing leads, revenue managers. What do you need this week? What's broken? What would make the next campaign work? Built custom solutions for teams drowning in enterprise software that wasn't designed for them.
Ran localization across 13 languages — an 18% boost in non-English markets came from treating localization as product work, not translation.
Additional clients included other global luxury hotel brands — each with specific needs that required custom solutions rather than templated deliverables.
What it produced
$2.8M in revenue over the engagement
12 products shipped in 18 months vs. 2–3 an agency would deliver in the same period
18% boost in non-English markets through localization as product work
Proved the model: a lean team embedded with operators ships faster and cheaper than agency cycles
What I learned
This is where the core principle formed. Hotels knew what they needed. They didn't need another strategy deck — they needed someone who could translate operational knowledge into working software fast enough to matter.
League was 5 people doing what agencies quoted 20 for. The AI tools I use now let one person do what League did with 5. The method is the same: embed with the people who do the work, build what they actually need, ship before the committee meets. The leverage just keeps compressing.
