Every opening I have been part of has slipped at least once, and the reason is almost never the thing everyone is watching.
The licence, not the paint
Construction delays are visible. Everyone can see scaffolding. Licensing is invisible until the week it matters, and it does not care that the rooms are ready.
Put the licensing pack on the critical path from day one, with names against each document and a date each one is expected. Not a folder. A path. If a permit needs an inspection that needs a certificate that needs a contractor who left in March, you want to know in month two and not in week forty.
The snag list nobody sorted
At handover you get a list of several hundred items. Some of them stop a guest sleeping in a room. Most of them do not.
Nobody sorts that list. It arrives as one undifferentiated wall, and the team works down it in the order it was written, which is the order somebody walked the building. Sorting it into what blocks opening, what blocks a specific room type, and what can be fixed in week three is an afternoon of unglamorous work that routinely saves weeks.
This is the kind of task where a machine genuinely beats a tired project manager at nine at night, because it is sorting, not judgement.
Hiring one month too late
Rooms open. Staff arrive the same week. Then the first two weeks of trading are a training exercise performed in front of paying guests, and those are the reviews that sit on your listing for the next year.
The team has to be hired and trained against the opening date, not the handover date, and those are not the same day.
The second opening is the real test
The first one is always chaos. Fine. The question is whether the second one is faster.
If it is not, nothing got written down. Somebody carried the knowledge in their head, left, and you are paying the same tuition twice. That is the point at which an opening manual stops being bureaucracy and starts being the asset.