I worked with a GM years ago who ran a 120-key property in a mid-sized Canadian market. Nothing fancy. Tight margins, skeleton crew, the usual. Every Thanksgiving, she organized a food drive in the lobby. Guests contributed. Staff contributed. The local paper ran a photo. And every year, her regional VP would ask the same question during the budget review: "What's the ROI on that?"

She never had a good answer for him. Not in the way he wanted it... not in dollars per occupied room or incremental bookings. But here's what she did have: the lowest turnover in the region. Not by a little. By a lot. Her housekeeping team stayed. Her front desk stayed. They stayed because they felt like they worked somewhere that gave a damn about something beyond the rate fence. That's not on any P&L line I've ever seen. But it's real. And it compounds.

So when I see Days Inns Canada marking four years of partnership with Food Banks Canada... 220,000 food packs going to kids in 235 communities this summer... my instinct isn't to be cynical about it. The cynical take is easy. "It's a press release. It's brand theater. Where's the dollar figure?" And look, they're not disclosing the donation amount, which tells you it's probably modest relative to the scale of the problem. Canada's food banks are expecting 2.2 million visits this month alone. One in three of those visits is a child. One hotel brand's donation isn't solving that. Nobody's pretending it does.

But here's what I've learned in 40 years of running hotels: community engagement isn't a marketing strategy. It's a culture strategy. When your team packs food boxes together (which the Days Inns Canada team did on May 27), something shifts. People who fold towels for a living start feeling like they're part of something bigger than room 214's late checkout. That's not soft thinking. That's retention. That's morale. That's the front desk agent who stays an extra year instead of jumping to the property across the street for fifty cents more an hour. And in a labor market where hospitality turnover is still hovering above 70%, an extra year from a good employee is worth more than most technology investments I've evaluated.

The part most operators miss is this: the program has to be real. Not performative. Not a one-day photo op that disappears until next year's press cycle. Days Inns Canada has done this four years running. They've built it into their "#FeedSummer" campaigns where individual properties and guests participate. That's the difference between culture and content. Your staff knows the difference. Trust me... they always know the difference.

Here's the thing nobody's telling you: if you're operating a property with 75+ years of history, you're sitting on untapped revenue and you don't even know it. The Hotel Jerome — a 140-year-old landmark in Aspen — just formalized tours with the Aspen Historical Society. Smart move. They're monetizing their story.

I've watched operators at historic properties treat their past like wallpaper. Nice to have, mentioned in marketing copy, maybe a few photos in the lobby. But they never ask the next question: who will pay to experience this? The answer is local historical societies, architecture groups, hospitality students, even competing properties doing comp shopping with context. The Jerome figured this out.

Let me be direct about the economics. A 60-minute tour priced at $25-35 per person with groups of 15-20 runs you maybe 90 minutes of staff time when you factor setup. That's $375-700 in revenue for labor cost under $50. Your marginal cost is almost nothing — you're already paying to light and climate-control those spaces. Run two tours a week and you're adding $40K-75K annually. Not transformational, but it's pure margin and it fills shoulder periods.

But the real value isn't the tour ticket. It's relationship-building with your community and creating another reason for locals to engage with your property who aren't staying overnight. Those historical society members? They have out-of-town guests. They plan events. They're retirement-age with disposable income. You're building your database and your local reputation while someone else (the historical society) does half the marketing.

The contrarian take: most "historic" hotel tours I've seen are terrible. Docent rambles about furniture for 45 minutes, skips the mechanical systems, never mentions the economics of restoration. If you're doing this, make it actually interesting. Talk about the renovation budget. Show the back-of-house. Explain why you kept the original windows or why you didn't. Give people the real story, not the sanitized brochure version.