Major events, particularly sports, seem to be the unifying theme of how hoteliers are looking at 2026.
Many CoStar News Hotels podcasts dove into that topic. Here are the highlights from recent podcast episodes that discuss that and more.
CoStar News Hotels
San Francisco and Santa Clara, California, recently enjoyed the outsized performance that comes along with hosting the Super Bowl, and Colin Sherman, director of hospitality analytics for Texas and the U.S. South for CoStar Group, said that showed up in the numbers.
"The transient and group demand have definitely expanded from that corporate base, which is helping improve their activity overall. You also have this large return-to-office trend in the past years, which has also fueled that midweek rise in transient demand," he said.
Another recent episode keyed in on San Francisco, but from a different perspective. HotelAVE cofounder and CEO Michelle Russo discussed the complicated process of getting the city's two largest hotels from receivership to sale after Park Hotels & Resorts decided to hand the keys back to their lenders rather than keeping up on $725 million in debt.
"They were beasts of assets," she said. "Two, thousand-plus-room properties with lots of moving parts. I have to say Park was really cooperative in assisting us in the transition."
While events have been much of the early discussion this year, a shift in artificial intelligence is also a major change the industry must face, Kurien Jacob, partner at Highgate Tech Ventures, said.
"There is actual validation of productivity and gains that is going to transform the overall landscape, and not just hospitality," he said. "As in any wave like this, you're going to have companies do extremely well, and you're going to have certain companies fail. And that's just part of reality."
On the other side of the globe, CoStar News Hotels' monthly check in on the Asia-Pacific region focused on Australia's Trilogy Hotels, a third-party operator looking to replicate the American model.
Hotel operators have "got so many dials that you can manipulate to drive a really fantastic financial outcome," Executive Chairman Tony Ryan said, adding he chose to get into operations after years as a lawyer focusing on hotel deals across the Asia-Pacific region. "The opportunity to get a lift in profit for a hotel, that opportunity is so much greater for us than in a shopping center or traditional property asset classes. ... So I think we want to be in the hard business, the bit that involves human beings. As everything else gets commoditized, it's the human element."
Tell Me More
The February edition of Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast, focused on how the year was getting off to a strong start to the year.
Co-host Isaac Collazo, STR's senior director of analytics, said the turnaround has been pinned largely to demand rather than revenue with hotels in January seeing their first demand increase since March 2025.
Next Gen in Lodging
The latest episode of Next Gen in Lodging focused on how hotels and restaurants are dealing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids impacting their employees.
Lilly Rocha, CEO of the Latino Restaurant Association based in Los Angeles, described the raids as "catastrophic."
"Obviously that creates issues for the entire economy of Los Angeles, California, in general because we as the Latino workers ... are like the backbone of the workforce, in restaurants," she said. "With the ICE raids, it created a very unstable employment environment where folks were either not going to work at all or just afraid to go to work."
The Upgrade
The latest episodes of CoStar News Hotels' Europe, Middle East and Africa focused podcast The Upgrade focused once again on the impact of sports and events, this time noting how Formula 1 has been a driver of demand.
Sarah Duignan, STR’s director of client relationships, discussed how the race in Abu Dhabi has boosted hotel rates roughly 80% since 2022.
“Abu Dhabi, in my humble opinion, is the most-exciting Formula 1 race of the season. … It is currently the last race of the season,” she said, adding that at the beginning of the race there were three drivers in contention to be the overall season champion.