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1. Corvex Management renews demand for Whitbread sale
Corvex Management, which claims it manages funds tied to more than 11.8 million shares of Whitbread PLC — or approximately 7% of parent company of the Premier Inn brand — has one again written to the board of the British firm and its shareholders demanding “a rigorous and comprehensive sale process for Whitbread.” According to Whitbread’s latest earnings results, published on May 13, Corvex owns approximately 9.35 million, or 5.3% of the company. Corvex made a similar request last December.
In its latest letter, Corvex said Whitbread’s current strategy is a “status quo [that] is untenable” and added that it “continues to trade at an unacceptable discount to intrinsic value, and with the challenges facing the business today, the need to pursue meaningful strategic and structural reform had become unignorable.”
In its recent earnings results’ presentation, Whitbread outlined a new five-year plan that, among other points, said it “would become a pure-play hotel business by 2031, with all of its 197 restaurants brands either repositioned in an integrated food and drink model or converted into a total of 8,000 more rooms.”
2. Oil prices rise again following renewed Trump threats to Iran
The price of Brent crude oil increased 1.7% on Monday to $111.13 following U.S. President Donald Trump's latest threats against Iran. The BBC reports Trump will reconvene his top security advisors on Tuesday to consider “options for military action regarding Iran.”
Elsewhere in the Middle East, on Saturday, the United Arab Emirates said three drones had “entered the UAE from the western border direction.” Two were intercepted, but the third had “struck an electrical generator ‘outside the inner perimeter’ of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant in Abu Dhabi, sparking a fire,” the BBC added. Iran lies to the north of the UAE.
3. India's hotel industry sees 58% investment increase
In the first three months of 2026, the Indian hotel industry has seen investment of $185 million, a 58% increase year over year, according to the Economic Times of India. In the same period in 2025, Indian hotels saw investment of $117 million.
The news comes days after India’s prime minister Narendra Modi called for Indians to forgo international travel and instead take their vacations within the country.
4. Rio hotel performance bolstered by free May concert
Performance in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro on the first Saturday of May has yet again been music to the ears of hoteliers. Now in its third year, “Todo Mundo no Rio," or “Everyone in Rio,” featured Shakira and drove hotel performance in Rio all weekend, according to an analysis from Nick Seaman, hospitality forecaster at STR, CoStar’s hotel analytics division.
Shakira’s concert on May 2 saw luxury hotel revenue per available room increase 12.1% year over year. Upscale RevPAR rose by 5.1%, although RevPAR dipped in the upper-upscale segment by 1.9%.
In 2025, Lady Gaga performed on the corresponding May Saturday, while the first event in 2024 was headlined by Madonna. Seaman said added hotel occupancy was at its highest level for that Madonna show, but ADR and RevPAR over the following two years “have steadily increased.”
5. Japanese hotel check-in system leaks info of 1 million guests
Hotel check-in system Tabiq, maintained by a Japanese company Reqrea and used by hotels across Japan, has leaked sensitive information from “more than 1 million [global customers],” according to an independent IT security researcher, Anurag Sen and reported by TechCrunch. Tabiq has been taken offline while the situation is being analyzed and corrected.
Sen told TechCrunch that Tabiq/Reqrea inadvertently “set one of its Amazon cloud-hosted storage buckets, which the check-in system uses to store customer data, to be publicly accessible. The data inside could be viewed by anyone using a web browser, without needing a password, by knowing only the bucket name: ‘Tabiq’.”