Cindy Estis Green ’79 Named 2025 Cornell Hospitality Innovator

​​The recipient of the 2025 Cornell Hospitality Innovator Award is Cindy Estis Green ’79, CEO and co-founder of Kalibri Labs, LLC, a hospitality platform that increases hotel value by identifying the most profitable revenue mix and driving smarter hotel real estate investments. The award will be presented at the Cornell Hospitality Icon and Innovator Awards Celebration on June 3, 2025, in New York City.

“We are so proud to honor Cindy and her extraordinary impact on our industry,” said Kate Walsh, the Dimond Family Dean of the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. “Cindy’s vision for reframing the concept of revenue, and our industry’s related measurement systems, makes her the ideal recipient of this year’s Innovator Award.”

Estis Green has been a data analytics and technology pioneer in the hospitality industry since her career began. At Kalibri, she continues to innovate, focused on optimizing revenue based on a hotel’s most profitable mix and equipping the real estate community with precise market insights for smarter discovery and more accurate underwriting.

“I am honored to be recognized by the Cornell community for my efforts to make profit the new ‘North Star,'” Estis Green said. “I founded Kalibri Labs to provide the data, technology, and education needed to improve hotel performance metrics for operations and development; when profitability factors into customer acquisition and developers better understand the composition of revenue, we can create a stronger, more sustainable industry that attracts investment, generates jobs, and results in a healthier hotel ecosystem.”

Estis Green started her career with Hilton International, spanning both corporate as well as operational roles, including as general manager of large full-service hotels. She then founded a data mining company, Driving Revenue, and sold it to Pegasus Solutions before spending 12 years as managing partner of The Estis Group, where she worked with hotel brands to craft distribution strategies and with owners to target asset value growth.

In response to large-scale digital disruption facing many industries, Estis Green co-founded Kalibri in 2012. Her goal was to provide the hospitality industry with a platform to focus on profit while optimizing for revenue and concurrently, real estate developers needed a better toolkit to respond to the growing complexity of the market. Using data provided by major hotel companies representing more than 100 brands, Kalibri uses proprietary technology and AI to help hotel owners, operators, and real estate developers identify their most profitable revenue mix, reduce acquisition costs, and strategically grow asset value.

Estis Green has shared her many insights with the industry by authoring several books. Her most recent, Demystifying the Digital Market & Guide to Commercial Strategy, examines the impact of digital disruption on the industry and offers a framework to improve profitability at a time when hotel owners are challenged with declining returns. Following its publication, she led a team in creating an online commercial strategy certification training program for owners, operators and developers, which will be rolled out in 2025 by a consortium of industry associations.

In 2023, Estis Green was inducted into the Cornell Hotel Society Hall of Fame, and she maintains strong connections with the Nolan School at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, serving as a Dean’s Distinguished Lecturer and more. Estis Green has also been honored with the HSMAI Vanguard Award for industry leadership in revenue optimization and profit contribution, and she was among the first women inducted into the HFTP Hospitality Technology Hall of Fame.