Let me open today's blog with a complaint: As much as I love the Hotel Data Conference every year, what I didn't love about it this year was the complete overlap with hotel earnings season.
HDC is usually a fun, hectic, informative blur, at least for me. I plan out the schedules for our entire news team, set up interviews, podcasts and videos, and generally always have a place to be and something to do. The whole event gets more hectic and less fun, though, when we have to cover about half of the publicly traded hotel companies' second-quarter earnings calls at the same exact time.
The silver lining from swimming through this chaos, though, was the combination of individual companies talking about where they're at midway through 2025 and the high-level national data shared during the conference painted a pretty clear picture on where the hospitality industry is at the moment. My encapsulation of that is this: This summer is a disappointment. More of the same is coming in the third quarter. But the turnaround will start in the fourth quarter en route to a strong 2026.
That last bit of optimism seems to be shared across the board, and the hotel brands and real estate investment trusts are backing that up with various anecdotes about having a more favorable business environment and strong group pace.
I'm not saying that's not true, but this feels like a familiar pattern to me. In my many years covering this industry, there have been good times and there have been bad for the industry at large. But there is this consistent sense that if things aren't going well at the moment, they definitely will be six months from now.
Why six months? Maybe it's because it's a time frame that's close enough to the present to matter but far enough away to not be completely in focus. Maybe it's because you're hoping people won't actually remember you made this prediction six months from now. But it's always six months.
During the worst of times, that six months is a rolling figure. It never gets any closer or further away than six months. If you said back in January that the next hotel industry golden age was going to hit six months later, you probably now feel the same way about early 2026.
We'll see how this theory plays out over the next few months. Will the mild optimism for the fourth quarter hold out or will people just start chalking up 2025 as a lost year because of all the "noise?" But my prediction is even if things go south, hoteliers are going to feel really good about summer 2026.
Let me know what you think on LinkedIn or via email.
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