I, and much of the European hotel industry, have returned from Madrid after the first industry conference of the year, the Atlantic Ocean Hotel Investors' Summit.
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.
The answer, of course, is Marriott International's September 2016 acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide — the hotel news sensation that captivated the nation (and the world) in the months leading up to the deal's completion and well afterwards.
In hotel investment, it’s easy to focus on the mechanics of value creation: development cost, brand selection, distribution and efficiencies. Yet one of the most decisive drivers of long-term performance is less tangible —and far more powerful: meaning.
Even with a slim 3-point lead, history was against the Indiana University Hoosiers football team last month as they found themselves in the final moments of this year’s Big Ten Conference championship.
The sentiment among United Kingdom hotel insiders is that 2025 was a relatively satisfactory year for hotel transactions, value and volume, and 2026 would probably bring more of the same.
My favorite part of January are all the trends lists popping up everywhere. This morning I heard that the culinary buzzword for 2026 will be "swangy," which is a portmanteau of "sweet and tangy." Swangy food absolutely will replace the so-last-year "swicy" — sweet and spicy — flavors you're probably familiar with, like hot honey fried chicken and spicy margaritas.
Now that the initial frenzy around AI is starting to settle down from flying cars and the end of the world to practical applications, one fact remains key: Data is everything.
For hotel owners, launching a new property or renovating an existing one is a high-stakes endeavor. Many assume hiring a general contractor and architect is enough to keep things on track.
I want to invite you all to join me in one of my favorite time-wasters, err ... guilty pleasures ... as we approach the end of a busy year — Hallmark holiday movies.
With the perfunctory New Year’s resolutions soon approaching, everyone is looking to starting fresh in 2026. For the hotel world, the appropriate adage is: “As one does at home, one will soon from their chosen travel accommodations.”
The sound of the rattling wheels of the raging branded residence bandwagon is deafening. While the concept can trace its history back to New York in the 1920s with the opening of the Sherry Netherland Hotel offering “permanent private apartments with hotel-style services," it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that hotel companies — led by the likes of Four Seasons in Boston — really started to see the advantage of developing luxury homes tied to their brand identity.
You have approved every request for new sales automation systems because salespeople report being overwhelmed with inbound leads. Now requests for proposals are responded to promptly, just like all those hotel technology salespeople said was the No. 1 path to closing more bookings.
