Carter and Ali have a combined 40+ years of experience distilling complex travel data to its essence and crafting compelling narratives through thousands of client projects and hundreds of public speaking engagements, media interviews, and industry articles. Telling stories is what we do, and Larkspur Hospitality Consulting's sole mission is to help you tell yours.
Carter Wilson, ISHC
Co-Founder
Carter has over three decades of experience in the hospitality industry, nearly all of them spent consulting. After fifteen years serving as Senior Vice President with HVS, Carter then spent a dozen years overseeing STR's consulting operations. A firm believer using complex data to weave simple narratives, Carter has extensive public-speaking experience, lecturing frequently at major conferences and company events for audiences from ten to 1,500.
In his other life, Carter is also the USA Today bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thriller novels, as well as numerous short stories. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a five-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his novels have been optioned for television and film.
Ali Hoyt, ISHC
Co-Founder
Ali was Senior Director of Consulting at STR for nearly 11 years. She led a consulting team that provided consulting services across a large, global, and diverse client base. Using STR’s proprietary database of hotel performance data, the consulting team worked directly with clients to deliver customized solutions that empowered clients to make informed decisions and implement effective strategies. Ali was a frequent speaker at industry conferences and meetings.
Ali is a member of the International Society of Hospitality Consultants (ISHC). In 2016, Ali was awarded the Lori Raleigh Award for Emerging Excellence in Hospitality Consulting from ISHC. Ali earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration.
Data is only as good as the story it tells.
Using industry-leading data, Ali and Carter service clients' needs on topics including hotel market identification, optimizing comp sets, market trends and opportunities, custom dashboards and internal performance insights, and destination analysis and competitive positioning. If there's a story within the data, we'll find it.
We also help companies tell their stories through communication coaching. Based on years of experience in front of audiences, Ali and Carter offer tailored coaching sessions on everything you need to convey your message. This includes in-depth classes and seminars on being a captivating speaker (no matter the audience size), creating persuasive presentations, powerful business writing techniques, hospitality-focused Excel training, running effective meetings, and media coaching. A company's strongest leaders are always its best storytellers.
Whether you're looking for help harnessing data to answer your most complex questions or coaching on communication and storycrafting, we're here when you need us.
Why the name Larkspur?
Ali and Carter both have strong connections to Colorado (Carter lives there now and Ali did for years) and wanted a name that reflected their shared love of the Rockies. Names like Peak, Pinnacle, and Summit were disregarded for being too generic. They did like Alpine, simply because it connotes being above the tree line, but they didn't want to mislead anyone into thinking they were ski consultants.
So they checked the trail map of one of their favorite mountains, Winter Park. And there it was: Larkspur. A blue-black run they'd each skied many times, one at the very top of the mountain, and, indeed, one above the tree line. So the name was chosen, the mountains became a part of the logo, and the little pine tree replacing the "I" in hospitality satisfied their need for working the whole tree-line thing into the name.
Larkspur is also the name of a lovely flower with many positive attributions—including the ability to ward off evil—but that was just an incidental benefit.
What kind of companies
use Larkspur?
Through our decades of combined experience, we’ve served over a thousand clients, including all the largest hotel brands, lenders and institutional investors, global private-equity firms, federal agencies, individual entrepreneurs, and scores of hotel development and management companies.
At Larkspur, we’ve found our expertise and resources to be ideally suited for small- to mid-sized hospitality firms, those companies that may not have their own in-house analytics staff or are seeking to develop their own storytellers but don’t have the resources or expertise to do so internally. We work with hospitality clients of all types and sizes, but the common thread between all of them is a need for clear and actionable information with a compelling story behind the data.