I wouldn't blame you for not noticing, but it's been three and a half months since my last blog about the hotel industry. And when I sat down to write that piece at the end of February, I asked what the tone of the industry would be when I came back for the 2025 NYU International Hospitality Investment Forum.
We now have the answer to that question and it seems to be "somewhat dreary" — especially in comparison to the more optimistic Americas Lodging Investment Summit back in January.
This is always somewhat true to a degree. The industry enters into a new year with a renewed sense of optimism that they share at ALIS then when they reconvene at NYU, a higher level of realism creeps into the conversation.
But the dichotomy this year is a bit more pronounced than usual.
One of the more interesting ways I've seen this manifest in the last few weeks since I came back from leave is how not only are hoteliers feeling more pessimistic — largely due to broad economic uncertainty — but they don't seem willing to own their own pessimism.
At NYU in particular, I had a lot of conversations with people or heard quotes from the general session stage that were all some variety of "everyone here is saying it's so bad," except no one was actually the one saying it's bad. They were all pointing to this imagined third party talking about how awful the current environment is before generally agreeing the headwinds are real and peppering in some optimism that there are still opportunities despite the hurdles the industry faces.
I get that this is always an optimistic industry, and we often openly joke that the tone at every hotel conference could be described as "cautious optimism," but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing to be the pessimist in the room. We don't need to invest an imaginary "they" who are saying things are dreary so we can performatively disagree with them before ultimately agreeing with the substance that yes things are more difficult than usual at the moment.
Hoteliers are worried. It's OK to be worried. Get up in the morning, seriously and thoughtfully confront the issues of the day, and keep moving forward. That's literally all any of us can do.
Let me know what you think on LinkedIn or via email.
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