The Cornell Hotel Administration Strategic Exercise, the CHASE, will allow the student the opportunity to boldly explore the marketing and management of a hotel operation in such an economy without the usual and attendant risks of failure. 
The student may even reap the joys of a financial success!
Hotel management begins with understanding the customer. This is the foundation of marketing - understanding the customer and the reasons for traveling away from home, selecting a hotel, and choosing a specific accommodation 
There are many surveys of important marketing factors: 

Cleanliness
Ease of placing a reservation
Guest room servicing during stay
Price
Courtesy and friendliness of the staff
Accessibility of shops, recreation or gaming facilities
Atmosphere
Speed of check-in and check-out
Amenities

The CHASE models a lodging environment. The learning objectives involve experience with strategic positioning, marketing attributes, financial reporting, operations analysis, and profit forecasting among competing properties. It is the sense of competition that engages the discovery objectives.

When the game begins the student will be one member of an executive committee responsible for directing the hotel. The challenge is to make key decisions about the factors above in concert with other members of the committee. Within the common trading area there will be several hotels in competition with the student’s. The managers of these operations will be making similar plans in their attempts to be profitable, and most likely attempting to be more profitable than the student’s enterprise. 
Competition will be keen.
After each market planning session, rates advertised and staff trained, the public can react and make their decisions about patronage.   An information system will be used to speed up the customers’ reaction time and reduce an accounting period of three months to a few moments.  The student’s executive committee will then receive a variety of reports on the operating, competitive, and financial condition.  Just as in managing a hotel, the student’s task will be to communicate, analyze, and make fresh decisions to improve the customers’ satisfaction, the financial condition, and the enhanced understanding of lodging management.
At the conclusion of the exercise the student’s management team will be responsible for reporting about the actions, key marketing decisions, financial strategies, the successes, failures, and what may be taken forward from this management experience in the CHASE.

Robert Chase, author of the CHASE, pictures management games as electronic case studies.  In the case method of instruction, the teacher’s role is to maximize discussion among students and to stimulate further discussion with feedback. Within the management game, experiential feedback is provided by an economic model producing periodic operating and financial information. Additional feedback and knowledge extension is guided by the facilitator as with traditional case instruction.

Through the evolution of periodic decisions and outcomes, the attendee will gain appreciation for the nature of hotel management, the risks involved, and the necessity for business skills and acumen gained through discovery instruction.