Reducing lodging costs by 40% through centralized reservations and strict governance
A centralized reservation system and tighter controls helped a Middle East upstream operator cut lodging costs and bring real discipline to camp safety and planning.
Starting point
An upstream operator in Oman ran multiple field camps that housed staff and contractors. Lodging was one of the largest controllable operating expenses. Bookings were handled by phone and paper, with camp staff juggling ad hoc requests, handwritten rosters, and spreadsheets of varying quality.
The result was predictable. People booked rooms “just in case” and didn’t bother to cancel when they were not needed. There was limited visibility across camps for annual turnarounds, shutdown planning, and no single, trusted list of who was on site at any given moment. Finance could see overall spend, but not which teams or roles were driving costs, or how long individuals were staying relative to policy. Safety leaders lacked a clean roster for drills or evacuation.
The Chief Operating Officer set a clear challenge for the leadership team: reduce lodging costs and put systems in place to sustain the lower costs.
Approach
The COO engaged a consulting team, with Bhuvan Maingi, now managing Strathen Group, serving as lead strategy consultant. The mandate was to design and implement a centralized reservation and control model that would reduce cost, improve safety readiness, and give leadership a transparent view of who was staying where and why.
The work started with a diagnostic led with finance to understand total lodging spend, booking patterns, and obvious leakage points for the past 3 years. They reviewed historical invoices, camp records, and any existing rosters to see how often bookings were made, how long stays lasted, and where “just in case” behaviors were most common.
With the baseline understood, he designed and built a centralized reservation model in Excel, deliberately using a tool the organization already trusted. The new model became the single source of truth for all bookings across the mulitple camps. Every reservation now required core fields: employee ID, role or title, purpose of stay, camp, and start and end dates. Data validation prevented double-booking the same bed and blocked reservations that exceeded camp capacity.
He embedded entitlement logic into the model so that senior and standard room types were automatically matched to role or grade. This reduced quiet misallocation of premium rooms and made exceptions visible. Controls were added for extended stays, with flags for bookings that exceeded agreed thresholds, such as more than 30 days in a quarter.
Reporting was built into the design rather than added at the end. The system generated monthly manager reports showing booking days and purposes by employee and team, and quarterly executive packs that summarized utilization, cost trends, and exceptions by camp and role. These reports gave line managers direct oversight of the bookings they were implicitly approving and gave executives a risk and cost view they had not previously had.
Operational integration was a critical part of the design. The model included instant roster exports so site leads could see who was on site at each camp in seconds, improving safety drills and evacuation readiness. A forward occupancy view supported shutdown and turnaround planning by giving maintenance teams confidence that bed capacity would be available on key dates. Outputs also fed into kitchen and inventory planning, giving the mess and catering teams a daily headcount to right-size food orders and reduce waste.
To make the change stick, the client instituted a no-paper policy for bookings, trained camp managers and supervisors, and put basic governance in place. This included monthly attestations from line managers and a simple audit trail of who booked, for whom, for what purpose, and for how long.
Instead of investing in a new system, the operator used a disciplined Excel model and clear governance to bring hotel-style control to camp lodging.
Outcome
Within six months of go-live, the operator reduced lodging costs by approximately 40 percent across 1100+ rooms at an average baseline rate of USD 45 per night. Transparency on bookings and tighter entitlements significantly reduced “just in case” reservations and unnecessary long stays.
Line managers now saw the lodging impact of their teams’ travel and rotation patterns, and had to actively own those decisions. Finance gained a clear, drillable view of spend by camp, team, and purpose of stay, which made conversations about cost and behavior more grounded and less anecdotal.
Operationally, the centralized model improved more than cost. Safety and emergency readiness improved because site leads could produce accurate rosters in seconds instead of relying on outdated paper lists. Shutdown and turnaround planning became smoother, since planners could see forward occupancy and coordinate maintenance windows with guaranteed bed capacity. Kitchen and inventory teams reduced food waste and stockouts by aligning orders with expected headcount.
For the COO and leadership team, the real value was a simple tool that people actually used, backed by governance and reporting that made behaviors visible. Lodging was no longer a black box. It became a managed cost lever tied directly to operational planning and safety.
For operations leaders, the lesson was that meaningful savings and better safety do not always require a new platform, but they do require a single source of truth, clear rules, and real accountability.
This work continues to inform how Strathen Group approaches operational excellence, favoring simple tools with a single source of truth, clear entitlements, and visible accountability over complex systems that field teams will not use.
