We are merely days away from the official unofficial kick off to the hotel industry year. While it's been 2026 for a few weeks now, the year doesn't start in earnest until hoteliers gather at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in Los Angeles.
With that in mind, it strikes me that we're likely to walk away from next week's festivities with a slightly more concrete idea on what the theme and the vibe of 2026 could be for the hotel industry.
To avoid being too snarky, I'll put away any suggestion that the theme will be some variety of "cautious optimism," a phrase I will no doubt hear on repeat during my time in Southern California.
What some hotel-focused Wall Street analysts told me about their expectations for 2026 recently isn't a bad start: "Less bad," was the phrase.
But even that isn't particularly descriptive.
We're still a few weeks away from the Lunar New Year and the start of the year of the horse — or the year of the fire horse if you want to be specific. As evocative as "fire horse" is as a theme for the year, it wouldn't be industry specific. From what I can glean, it also wouldn't be good news for a wood rat like me.
So those are all things that won't be the theme. Here's the hard part in this column where I have to think of a theme that just might actually work.
I'll take the easy way out and suggest something that might be a bit aspirational:
How about "the year of certainty?" Or maybe we soften it into "the year of a little more certainty?"
After the roller coaster half a decade we've all lived through, would that be too much to ask? I know there are certain parts of this audience and this industry that almost want certainty more than they want growth.
So lets cross our fingers and hope that this is the year that projections matter, the fog starts to clear and everything becomes just a little more normal.
Let me know what you think on LinkedIn or via email — especially if you have suggestions for a theme for the year.
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