A Hospitality Journey: How Hospitality America’s CEO Ben Campbell Makes Work a Team Sport

In hospitality, growth is never just about adding more properties—it’s about building a culture that attracts talent, inspires teams, and supports exceptional guest experiences. Few leaders embody this balance as clearly as Ben Campbell, CEO of Hospitality America.

In this conversation with Josiah Mackenzie, VP of Marketing at Actabl, Ben shares his journey from college athletics to hotel sales director to CEO, the core values driving his company’s culture, and how technology helps his teams stay efficient and engaged while keeping people at the heart of the business.

Josiah Mackenzie: I’ve always loved hearing about people's journeys into the hospitality industry. How did you get started in the world of hospitality?

Ben Campbell: I graduated from college in 2009, not a great time to be looking for a job! I played baseball and was an athlete my entire life. I found that when I was part of someone's great experience, whether at a restaurant, a sporting event, or a hotel, I felt a sense of fulfillment from it. It just became something that I gravitated towards, and I became addicted to.

Josiah: What keeps you working in hospitality?

Ben: I'm a problem solver. What we deal with every day, whether it's with people or things that happen internally or externally, there are always problems to solve. I've always wanted to leave a lasting impact on any business, person, or team I'm a part of. Hospitality was a perfect fit for me, and it remains so.

Josiah: Is there a piece of advice that you received along your journey that has stayed with you?

Ben: My dad ran a business in Greenville, South Carolina, while I was growing up. He would always say, ‘Treat it like it's yours.’ My mom, on the other hand, would say, ‘Leave it better than you found it.’ Those were core principles that were instilled in me when I was growing up. No matter what team, company, or people I lead today, I always want to leave it better than I found it.

Josiah: Can you tell us a little bit about Hospitality America and the strategy behind it?

Ben: Hospitality America was founded in 1995. Our founder, Chris Cargen, opened two hotels within 30 days of each other. One in South Florida and one in East Tennessee, and the company was born. Today, we operate 20 hotels for five different clients; mostly, our portfolio is located east of the Mississippi. We are still down in South Florida; that's still a client of ours. We want to grow, and a good target for us is going to be in that 40-45 hotel range.

Josiah: What was your path to the CEO role?

Ben: I've been with our company for 10 years. When I started, I was a director of sales of a 115-room Hampton Inn. I transitioned to general manager, then corporate director of operations, then to COO, and now to CEO.

Through that journey, I've seen what my team members have gone through, what I went through as a team member, and really focused on how we’re going to attract the next talent or the next leaders and how we’re going to retain the truly talented individuals that we've spent the past decade cultivating and growing. That became my first mission.

I had to grow our team, and I felt an overwhelming sense of, ‘How do I make sure that people are the fit?’ I needed to objectively define that, and we did. Our core values are passion, excellence, adaptable, community, and humble. We call it PEACH. Everybody who walks around in our company, especially our leaders, asks, ‘Are we being PEACH today?’ And we question, how can we leverage that to be better every single day?

Josiah: How does technology help you to deliver on PEACH?

Ben: We've been a user of ProfitSword for a long time, but as new products have come on, like Hotel Effectiveness and Transcendent, it then becomes, ‘How are we leveraging the entire ecosphere of our tech stack to align with our strategy to make sure that we're as efficient as possible?’

For example, our Hotel Effectiveness labor plans help us understand the purpose of that day and how we're going to execute our job.

The associate engagement with Transcendent enables our engineering teams to seek to win; they want to be the best, want to make sure they're the number one.

We all know in our industry that labor is hard to find, so when we find highly talented individuals, we want to make them as efficient as possible. The talent that we're trying to recruit for our hotels wants to be trained better; they want to understand the full scope of what their job entails. We're doing that throughout the entire environment with Actabl, from our forecasting on ProfitSword to Hotel Effectiveness and Transcendent.

Josiah: What advice would you give to other hotel leaders considering a tech investment?

Ben: I would recommend doing a deep dive into what's working and what's not. There are a lot of new technologies that are coming out that can accomplish the same thing. One thing that we assessed was the relationship between ProfitSword and Sage Intacct. The big thing with any tech is how they all interact and how they all engage with one another.

Then, ask where the pain points are with your teams? What is wasting time in our accounting department? What is causing time that could be automated with the ultimate tech stack? There's something out there that Actabl can help with. With Sage Intacct and ProfitSword, it's only going to get better, making the end user even more efficient.

Josiah: What are your next steps for Hospitality America, and how does the company culture support this?

Ben: What’s great about where we are as a company is that we're a very healthy company. We have a great culture, we have a great vision, but I'm not looking to just absolutely grow at an exponential rate. We have a great client base today, they're growing as well, and we grow with them. For us, it's about that strategic growth. By doing that, we'll really keep hold of our culture that we've built. Having PEACH is really our north star; that's who we are. People, process, and results are our pillars; that's what we do, but who we are is really about passion, excellence, an adaptable community, and humility. I think that if we keep that at our core and everyone understands who we are and what we expect when they come into our organization, I think we'll be great.

To end, I would just like to say thank you to our team. For the second year in a row, we are being recognized by USA Today as a top workplace, and that recognition brings a lot of pride to many of our associates. It's not just us recognizing them; it's USA Today, a major publication in the United States, recognizing us, which is cool. I want to say congratulations to them, and the best is yet to come.

• Discover how Hospitality America streamlined operations and strengthened culture with Actabl. Read the case study now.