No Show
No Show is about the business of travel: hotels, tourism, technology, changing consumer tastes, the conference industry, and what you actually get for $50 worth of resort fees.
Hosts Jeff Borman and Matt Brown explore the intersection of design, architecture, place, emotion, and memory. When we travel, we pass through these intersections, supported by a massive business infrastructure and a fleet of dedicated (and patient) service professionals.
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Big Questions about Hotels (Spring 2025 Edition)
Questions like:
What's the secret number hotel people really care about?
Is the hotel market oversaturated in the U.S.?
Are there any markets that really are oversaturated though?
What's an underserved luxury market?
Who are the hotel winners in 2025? Who's making lemonade?
And is the hotel concierge truly dead?
what do you want to call today?
Speaker 2:you want to call it grab bag but I thought I already gave you a title I don't know if we can use that title, I think, for seo purposes.
Speaker 1:I try to keep expletives out of the actual title, but I like the enthusiasm, I like the energy, as always. I'll title it something clever after, but this is essentially you and I talking about the stuff we always talk about. Yeah, and typically when the mics aren't on, where I roll into some bar that you're sitting at and say, jeff, why does the sun rise the way that it rises? Why does the wind blow the way that it does?
Speaker 2:And I say beautiful things, like Matt the sun rises wherever you are, that's true, that's sweet.
Speaker 1:Look at all this love Spring's here. We apply them to the rigors and the ins and outs of the hotel industry, because you have done this for a long time, you know a lot about it. It's like you're my Google for all things hotel. You're like just this living supercomputer. So I'm going to take advantage of that supercomputer today and ask you some questions that have kind of vexed me over the last year as we've been doing this podcast. Let's just see what happens, shall we?
Speaker 1:Hi everybody, it's no Show. I'm Matt Brown, joined as always by Jeff Borman. Jeff, I'll get the ball rolling. Question number one we talk a lot about numbers on this show and I need to do a better job when we interview guests, because a lot of times we'll have hardcore hotel people, as I call them the hotel folk, and when they come in they just swim in statistics and numbers that the hotel industry knows very well but that a lot of people outside of the industry, even if they're in travel, a lot of people might not be so familiar with and they get flung around so quickly that it's like whoa, what's he talking about again? So I want to talk about a specific number here, a secret number. I want to know what the secret number or stat is that hotel people really care about, either on the executive level or on the hotel ownership level, or if you're working the front desk, that what's the number that you kind of always have your eye on with the hotel Hotel people requires a little definition.
Speaker 2:I think Owners of hotels care about cash returns. The profit that's left over after all the expenses gets reinvested in the properties or it adds to the asset values or it gets returned to shareholders as dividends. Any of those things drive the value of the REIT or whatever form investment form it's in. But so I think the owner it's just pure cash. But if you're asking the operator or, let's say, the brand, right, brands care about NUG, net unit growth. There's one for you that we should probably speak more than say NUG. And what is NUG? Just adding hotels. Last year you had 100 hotels. This year you have 105. Your NUG is five hotels and that's the way brands grow, right? I think.
Speaker 2:If you remember back to when we had Zach on in January of this year, we really talked a lot about the business model. January of this year we really talked a lot about the business model for the biggest brands in hotels is not to grow through Revpar. Revenue per available room that's kind of the standard bearer metric for the health of the hotel. But the brands really don't grow much on Revpar. The owner might grow on Revpar, but the brand really grows by planting a new flag. Do you have 10 Marriott hotels in Pittsburgh now? Do you have 13 of them at the end of the year? That's really meaningful growth for the brand.
Speaker 2:Now, underneath NUG, driving factors and forces, metrics guest satisfaction. You can't grow more hotels and fill them if guest satisfaction is not high. Right, they're not coming back to Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt or your loyalty program growth. Those numbers are cited about as much as Revpar anymore, it seems. Well, that's because as you expand your units from in the Pittsburgh example 10 to 13 hotels, your units from in the Pittsburgh example 10 to 13 hotels you better have a huge and growing loyalty program to keep them all full.
Speaker 2:But I think it comes back to nug if you're a brand, cash, if you're an owner but you gave the example too, of a property manager and that's probably the toughest situation to say there's a magic number, because they are caught between those two. They need to deliver all the things that the brand cares about and all the things that owners care about. It's where the rubber meets the road and I think actually, matt, there's probably in the early days of COVID, when we could all align on one metric, all sides could align on a number that was 30 or 40 percent occupancy number. That was 30 or 40% occupancy because below that mark and it depended a bit on the class of hotel, but below 30 to 40 occupancy the hotel could not be profitable and was better off to be closed. So that kills all parts of the food chain?
Speaker 1:Do the hotel brands? Do they like NUG? Let's just kind of reduce this down. They like Nug because, A there's a franchise fee that's paid to them and B I would imagine, if these are publicly traded companies, that your stock valuation goes up.
Speaker 2:Both those are true. So if let's just say you know you have one hotel and it makes $100, you can put, as a brand manager, immense effort into growing the top line, the revenue of that hotel. Let's say the natural growth in that market is 3%, You're going to grow from $100 to $103 this year. If you put incredible effort against the commercial acumen and success, maybe you grow instead of 3%. You grow 4%. That's a 25% outperformance of the marketplace. That's an incredible degree of outperformance.
Speaker 2:But if you're the brand, then you're looking at this and you think, okay, so Revpar went from $103 to $104. It took all that effort to get another buck out of that, Whereas instead I could put my effort into opening a neighboring hotel where I get credit for the next $100. And then you take the fees on that. So if the fees were 10%, well, out of the $100, you made 10 bucks. You take Revpar to 104, you're making 10% of that number. But you open a neighboring hotel at $100 and all of a sudden you have doubled your franchise fees coming into yourself.
Speaker 1:What's that tension like between the operator of the hotel and the brand? Because I feel like it can be palpable, but it's never spoken out loud. If you are one of 10 hotels in the Pittsburgh area owned by a particular brand and I'm sure there are sub-brands there too, so it's not like you've got like 10 Renaissance hotels all in the same area, but you've got the same kind of overarching big brand that owns all these sub-brands and they're all planted down in one urban area. They never talk about it publicly because they don't want to burn bridges, but doesn't that always frustrate hotel owners when a brand decides we're going to go for NUG, we're going to go for another flag to plant in the ground and we're going to do it two miles away from your hotel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%, 100%, yeah, were up to owners. So I mean a lot of owners. Most agreements that an owner has with a brand has a territorial jurisdiction to it that prevents a brand from putting, to your point, 10 Renaissance's in a city. It'll have some territorial clause that protects the owner from there being another Renaissancenaissance too close by. But there are a million ways around it, right? Instead of putting a renaissance, you're just going to put an autograph collection hotel Soft brand can't stop that, right. Years ago, developers used to joke that when there was a courtyard every five blocks and Marriott ran out of room to put more courtyards, there was going to be a hotel between those two courtyards, and Marriott rightly wants to have it under a flag of its. And so they went out and bought AC and that allowed them to put a hotel without compromising the territorial requirements that the owners of those two courtyards that were existing already had. So yeah, it's a cat and mouse game for sure.
Speaker 1:But you, if you're a hotel owner, you don't have a lot. I mean, are there ever any closed door meetings where you kind of give it to the brand Like, hey man, I've been trying to be a custodian of this brand and you're, you're really, you're really screwing me by opening a whatever, some kind of comparable thing four blocks down the street?
Speaker 2:It's difficult to show material impact. It is very possible, but it can be difficult. So you open that hotel two doors away or two blocks, or whatever your market condition might be. Sometimes a mile is very close. If you're in Manhattan a mile is irrelevant. But whatever it is, you have to prove as an owner that your business has been harmed and from there it gets really into the deep with lawyers figuring out how to right the damages that have been done. You can mitigate fees A lot of times. That's what the resolution would be. If brand and owner agree that on an annual basis this is going to do $500,000 damage to the existing hotel, they may agree then that the management fee at that existing hotel could be dropped from and I'm making up numbers 10% to 7%. You know an offsetting amount. But those things are usually negotiated in dark rooms with lawyers. In the end, the commercial people who are out there trying to make the best out of every property you kind of just suck it up deal with it move on To that point.
Speaker 1:here's question number two for the JeffBot1000. Is the hotel market oversaturated in the US? Do we have too many hotels?
Speaker 2:I think we got to go back to the first perspective, right? If you're saying from an owner's perspective, of course there are. We never want more hotels. The existing supply is too much. In fact we should have a reduction in supply. And if you're talking to the brands, absolutely not. There is plenty of room for growth. Travel is gigantic and there's not enough hotels anywhere, ever. So the perspective is everything. Maybe what you're really asking is in certain markets.
Speaker 2:I think we can get probably a less evasive answer if we think of certain places, if we, if we think of certain places, everyone, I think, would agree that San Francisco has too many room nights right now. There are too many rooms, I should say, in inventory. There's just not enough demand into that city at this time to support it. We've seen since 22, several of the largest hotels in San Francisco completely close, close forever, goodbye. Maybe they'll become condos, maybe they'll open up again as a hotel on another 10 years with a different owner and investor strategy when the market returns. But I think San Francisco hosts the Super Bowl next year and that'll be about the first event where they'll actually wish they had those rooms back. But you're talking a four-day event over the course of a decade. So I think San Francisco you can come up with some other examples the Rust Belt in general is growing too slowly to absorb supply. Existing businesses would be better off with a supply reduction.
Speaker 2:We're talking my homeland Cincinnati, Cleveland, buffalo, indianapolis. These places don't need more, they need less. Minneapolis not really Rust Belt, but it never recovered from the George Floyd situation. It's kind of crazy. Portland, oregon you and I had a great conversation last fall about this and despite being an outstanding city, it's still off the radar for too many travelers. They remember it as a place of homelessness, drug abuse, poor governance and even if there's some truth in that stuff, portland's an awesome place. So I mean of those markets, I think, yeah, there's a real oversaturatedness to it. Right now I'm probably most optimistic about Portland's return. The same formula that made it great years ago, I think, still exists. It's just going to have to get out of people's recent memories that it was a trouble spot.
Speaker 1:You live in Dallas right now. You lived in DC, the DC area, for years. But you live in Dallas right now and it seems like every time I'm in Dallas, essentially every other building is a hotel. It's like maybe that's because you know I'm there for conferences and you know kind of flying in and out of dfw, it's just that's all kind of hotel land right there. But is dallas? Is dallas oversaturated?
Speaker 2:um, if it feels that way, now just wait. Because it's the largest pipeline in all the us. More hotels are being built in Dallas than anywhere else. Why is that Wildly successful economic city? Honestly, a lot of businesses are moving to Texas. This number is a few years outdated, but I think 250,000 people were moving from the coast to Texas earlier this decade annually. Businesses are moving here because it's a low tax environment. It's very affordable.
Speaker 2:Your part-time home in Atlanta is very similar in that it is never-ending suburban sprawl, which personally troubles me quite a bit, but in New York City your home now, there's not one square inch of undeveloped land. If you can get a hold of it, you can make something out of it. In Dallas, though, or in Atlanta, where the downtown is just really in sad shape right now, they don't bother to repair and fix downtown Atlanta. You just build something else in Buckhead, or Midtown is now all the rage or out in Cobb County, where they just built the new Truist Stadium for the Braves.
Speaker 2:Downtown Atlanta is really suffering for that Dallas, I think some locals who are very proud of their city would say that's happening, but as somebody who gets to see most of the top 25 cities in the US on an annual basis. Dallas's downtown is not nearly degrading to that degree. It's a thriving place, but you also still have almost endless expansion across the Plains. Yeah, dallas has the biggest pipeline in the business in the US and it's continuing to grow. Not only is it the biggest, it's growing at the fastest pace too in its pipeline. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 1:Let's switch gears here. Let's talk about Hawaii. We don't talk about Hawaii that much and that should change. It relies so heavily on Asian inbound travel and has forever I feel like everybody who goes there is Pacific Rim. You're either taking a weekend trip from California somewhere or you are coming from Asia and you want kind of an American holiday, but you want something that's a little more accessible and a little bit closer. How is Hawaii doing in this kind of post-COVID Trump 2.0 landscape?
Speaker 2:Hawaii is kind of a frustrating place, I think, because it continues to do self-harm. It's got enough things going against it without hurting itself in the process too. You mentioned it relies very heavily on Asian inbound travel, really more specifically Japanese. A lot of Korean, but mostly Japanese and Japanese travel to the island is still down 50% to pre-COVID. The yen being at its lowest value of the dollar since the 80s makes it extremely expensive to what used to be its biggest inbound market expensive to what used to be its biggest inbound market. Of course we don't want to go too deep into the saber rattling that's going on by our country right now, but we're not making people feel particularly welcome either. So it's the only state that has that kind of reliance on a foreign inbound market and it's really feeling it.
Speaker 2:And where Hawaii has done a poor job, in my opinion, is that it was also the American poster child for over-tourism. Right, we don't want you tourists. And well, that's a really bad idea for a state that relies its entire economy on tourism. That's really dangerous position to take. And now Hawaii is going to place a 10% tourism tax across the state. So I think it's a wildly bad time for that to happen. It's already extremely expensive. It always has been expensive to get to anyway. So they're going to add to that expense and I really just don't see this going well, I think, if you kind of want to give them one more hard blow. Hawaii, segmentation wise, does not do a lot of business travel, but it does have a considerable amount of government travel and given what's going on with Doge and cuts and cuts and cuts and cuts, government is extremely down right now and also wildly unpredictable. So I think Hawaii is in a tough spot right now and will be for a while if it continues to chase away the hand that feeds it.
Speaker 1:Let's see what else I have in my question bag here. Okay, so we talked about oversaturation. What is an underserved luxury market? What's a place that's ripe for more luxury hotels to come in and make some money?
Speaker 2:Not the Caribbean? Why is that? There's way too much super expensive luxury hotel supply. It was too much before and it's being piled on to. Every new opening comes at the cost of a finite amount of demand.
Speaker 2:Essentially, generally speaking, I don't like at least as a long-term investor relying on airlift. Like Hawaii, you can't drive there If airlift is too expensive into a US continental city. They can rely more on a drive market, on a domestic market. Caribbean doesn't really have that. The other part of the Caribbean is at least in the luxury segment. It's expanding so quickly exactly in that high-end segment. Right?
Speaker 2:You're not seeing a lot of extended stay hotels and business hotels or convention hotels. So all the supply that goes into the Caribbean is beachfront resort and it just dilutes the hotels that exist because every newer hotel is cooler and shinier and has more bells and whistles than the one before it. So, generally speaking, I would love to see it's impossible, of course, but a moratorium on luxury building in the Caribbean Key West and, by the way, this is one last thing on Caribbean those are also in many cases, economies that rely on tourism very heavily. The Dominican 75% of GDP is from tourism. Aruba and St Kitts and St Lucia right, not many of those places have other thriving industries. So the more we expand the supply of hotels and the more it dilutes the earnings per key, the worse off those hotels will perform and the worse off the whole market will perform.
Speaker 1:And does the Caribbean have mid-market anymore, or is Airbnb kind of taking a slice of that pie? I mean, can you go and stay in a? I wonder if people who don't want luxury Can you go and stay in a? I wonder if people who don't want luxury but they still want a Caribbean vacation. Do those people just go to Florida or they just go somewhere else? I wonder if the region has kind of in a strange way, sort of priced out its middle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Airbnb thing is a major problem, A market that I know well, St Thomas, since over the last 10 years St Thomas has added 5,000 Airbnb listings 5,000. In relation to hotel rooms, that's a tripling of the hotel supply. If it were equivalent, the island can't hold that. It doesn't have the labor force and so it dilutes everything around. It dilutes the hotel earnings. It dilutes the earnings for the local who wants to work, as people don't stay in hotels where they can gain employment. Instead they're staying in Airbnbs where there's far less. Last thing to that, even though we're not really talking about housing markets, when 5,000 homeowners turn their places into temporary hotels through Airbnb or similar sites, it raises the price massively of homeownership or rent on the people who are on the island trying to serve these travelers. So in an island like St Thomas it's almost impossible to get labor to the market because you can't afford to paya bellman $100,000 a year. But that's what it costs to live on St Thomas now that every former resident owner is pimping out their place on Airbnb.
Speaker 1:It does seem like if you're going to make an argument for Airbnb in a place, it is something like a St Thomas or St John's, because he is especially for mid market, because there's a decent chance. If you're going, you're going with family, it's the family vacation for a week and we want a kitchen and we want three bedrooms and we maybe want a pool and and not so that you can't get those things sometimes in a hotel. But I don't see a ton of extended stay options down there, probably because there's just no space for those. So the house rental thing I guess makes sense there from a housing option.
Speaker 2:I know it doesn't, I know the hotel industry probably doesn't like it, but Well, actually nobody likes it, except the 5000 people who are renting their houses out and getting some cash for it. The labor force doesn't like it either. The restaurateurs don't want it because they now these people have their own kitchens. The infrastructure that the Island was built on over the last 75 years depends on people flying in, staying in a hotel and eating and drinking at local establishments, when they can just fly to your cousin Matt's house. Instead of. That's a seat on the plane that does not turn into anything. That generates revenue for the people who work there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, exactly like a concierge. So the concierge lives everybody. What do we want to go to next? Let me see. Let me see. Ok, let's all right, let's go back to hotel people I talk about like they're hobbits, or hotel people we are there's, they're well-dressed hobbits, I mean the actual hobbits are pretty well dressed in fairness, we're talking a lot about it.
Speaker 1:does the do hotel people? Are they gravitating to luxury? I feel like we just see a lot of stuff about luxury right now, like more than more than ever, and I wonder if the industry is kind of gravitating to it because they're trying to figure out their niche, to appeal to that audience and that, unless you're luxury or I mean maybe business, maybe extended stay I feel like it's getting the most heat out of any segment in hotels. Is that?
Speaker 2:fair If by heat you mean time in the media. I totally agree. I think everybody loves to talk about luxury.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It is sexy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it helps sell the whole industry, like, even if you're not going to go, stay in a luxury hotel somewhere. If you see an article about a luxury hotel like that's the White Lotus, right, it's like, oh, sicily, I should go to Sicily, even if you end up staying somewhere else.
Speaker 2:Exactly what I'm doing. In five weeks I'm going to Sicily and I'm not staying at that Four Seasons, and not because I didn't want to, but because it is impossible to book. You can have the same or similar conversation about a economy hotel. Most of the metrics will be about the same, but it's way more fun to talk about a Ritz-Carlton than a Fairfield Inn.
Speaker 1:You know, with all of this kind of economic turmoil right now, I mean we haven't seen as much turmoil. It's the threat of turmoil I think we live under every day. I wonder if that threat of turmoil is affecting luxury in some way, either on the construction side or on the purchasing side. As a consumer, I wonder if people are pulling back right now on what they're spending on luxury, or if there's kind of a wait and see, or if it's kind of full steam ahead. The numbers look good.
Speaker 2:So there's a price sensitivity across all segments right now. So luxury is feeling it a little bit of a pullback in pricing. Where you lose pricing, you lose profit. I think luxury is going to be redefined over the next 10 years. It's happening now, but it takes a while for this to really change enough consumer minds. The current crop of luxury brands are not just saturated but they're commoditized. The current crop of luxury brands are not just saturated but they're commoditized, which is far worse.
Speaker 2:It used to mean something to say I'm staying at the insert big global brand. It means less. Now People are less. You know, millennials and Gen Z are more likely to talk about their stay with great passion at Urban Cowboy because it's so different, they can't wait to talk about it and it's unique and different and Instagrammable. It's also harder to do. Oh, what is that? Where are those? Can I go find one? Oh, it's one of a kind. No, there are six of them. If that's right, we should have Lion on Sunday. But if you want to stay at a Ritz-Carlton it used to be the reserve of the elite and, quite honestly, now anybody can do it. So I think luxury is going to change into luxury and ultra luxury and again that's happening.
Speaker 2:The days of considering a 500 room hotel, regardless of brand, considering it to be luxury. I think that's gone right. Even in las vegas, where you've got some of the finest hotels in the world, I don't believe you can have a 3 000 room luxury hotel you like. My definition of luxury cannot be met with 3 000 guest rooms and what's required to service them, so there's very little exclusivity in the luxury tier. Now. We saw numbers last year like 1,000 hotels run over $1,000 ADR or something crazy. That's no longer the definition of luxury. We got to get to the hotels that are $5,000 a night. No, let's talk about those. That's luxury probably.
Speaker 1:Speaking of Vegas, as always, we have to bring up Vegas every other episode it's in our bylaws and also exclusivity. I've been thinking a lot about this over the last week because there was a story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal about concierge desks closing at some major properties in Vegas, and there were a lot of pseudo think pieces that came after it, like is the concierge truly dead? And I think the reality is probably more complicated than that. I have a thought about it, but I want to ask you is the hotel concierge gone?
Speaker 2:No way. No, it's evolving, but when I started my career journey in the 90s, the internet was supposed to replace every concierge. That clearly hasn't happened, but it has taken away a lot of travel desks, right, these you used to see in some hotels where it's just someone with a bunch of brochures, not really an elevated concierge at a luxury hotel, someone with a bunch of brochures, not really an elevated concierge at a luxury hotel, but the travel desk. That could be replaced by what's now a mobile phone.
Speaker 1:A lot of that stuff's gone, right. Right, the concierge desk I feel like devolved maybe isn't the right word, but it over the decades, morphed into essentially an information desk and you'd maybe go to maybe they do cab stand there too and it's like can you, uh, can you tell us which direction this restaurant's in? It wasn't this kind of a romantic idea of what a concierge is, where you go down there and it's like, hey, I need tickets to this impossible show and I'm a guest at your hotel and can you get them for me? It's like, yes, sir, and that I don't. I don't know if that ever existed for everybody, but it, I think hotels kind of looked at what that desk was doing and then they also noticed that it was splitting that kind of labor up around all the people who work in the hotel lobby. You know the people behind the front desk can just as easily kind of handle those questions as like a dedicated concierge desk and probably do it more reliably, but it does.
Speaker 1:I mean, the high end concierge is probably still there for VIPs. I don't know who counts as a VIP anymore, but I'm sure when you're staying at a major property let's stay on the Vegas example let's say you're staying at the Fontainebleau or you know, like the Conrad and resorts world, I'm sure if you're some kind of roller, high roller, there's a number they give you and it's not just an app. Maybe the app is part of it, maybe it's like a luxury kind of app too that maybe gets you special things. But there's has to be like a person, still a personal concierge you call him, and that person gets stuff for you, makes things happen, right, or is that fantasy?
Speaker 2:I think that's totally right, the experiences are growing in importance. Now you could say that's the reason people traveled leisure travel anyway. Right, and let's actually let's take it this way by segment group travelers. If you're a conventioneer, you're probably not using the concierge very heavily, right? You're going to your meetings, you're going to the dinners that are pre-planned, you kind of know what your ins and outs are. If you're a business traveler, largely very similar, right. What time is my meeting and what room is it in? The experiences are what drive leisure travel and that is becoming increasingly important. And you see this, whether it's through M&A, a billion dollars transacted earlier this year on just experiences tech platform right, so the investment side of travel is going very heavily into experiences, which is right.
Speaker 2:In your concierge area. I think the question isn't, at least to me, whether or not that is at the forefront or whether it's augmented by the human, and I think the human in the luxury experience is still going to be the critical go-between. I can make a reservation on open table, but to know what to order, what's not to miss there, I want that experience with the concierge who says try this, it's off menu, or ask for this person. He's the Psalm and he will let you know which cab he has in the back that's not on the menu and tell him I sent you. There's no AI function that's going to deliver that, but the concierge, who can create better experiences, is going to win out in every scenario.
Speaker 2:I think this is kind of like we talked to someone about travel agencies being one of the top three jobs most likely to be replaced by AI. Travel agent or advisor OTAs were supposed to do that too. They did not. But what they did is they took a lot of volume out of the travel agency world, but the volume they took was that purely transactional stuff. Make the reservation. What they evolved into as travel advisors was depth of local knowledge. It would take you months to research and have the kind of knowledge that my specialist at Audley for Sicily has gained through 10 years of traveling to Sicily and doing thousands of trips for other people. I can't get that any other way than to talk to the human expert.
Speaker 1:You handle hotel data every day, all day. When I think of you, I think you're like Neo in the Matrix You're just constantly seeing the world as streams of data coming at you.
Speaker 2:I was once for Halloween. Halloween Keanu Reeves. Not surprised, you still are, but I went as the. What was the series he did after he lost his wife and dog.
Speaker 1:Oh, John Wick.
Speaker 2:Yes, but I went as the John Wick character.
Speaker 1:I thought you were going to tell me you did some kind of mashup where it's like I went as Keanu and I changed outfits throughout the evening to be different Keanu Reeves, which I think is a great idea.
Speaker 2:It's so easy to do John Wick, though it is Dressed in black.
Speaker 1:His outfits over the years are very trench coat heavy. Once you get past Bill and Ted era, they're very trench coat heavy, though I think it would be fun to like throw speed in there. That's a lot of work, though, to do five keanu reeves over the over the course of an evening. Maybe the the strategy there is to maybe get a group and locate everybody here, pick which keanu reeves they want to be from the movie, and then you all show up at a party as keanu reeves. Anywho, this is what. This is what you and I really talk about when we're not doing this podcast. So you're looking at data. Who are the hotel winners in 2025? Is anybody a winner in 2025? Is anybody making lemonade out of this storm of lemons?
Speaker 2:I think for the most part, everybody across the industry is just trying to mitigate volatility. The winners are the ones that win a battle of attrition and lose the least from what they expected the year to give. I'm unaware of any segment that has said life got better after Q1, not a single kind of hotel.
Speaker 1:And I wonder how accepting bosses are of all this talk Like what's that? What are those conversations like when you're sitting in there with, you know, the CEO of a holding company that owns 20 hotels or 30 hotels or a single hotel, and you know it's the quarterly meeting, everybody's going to come in. I wonder what I? I'm. My thoughts and prayers are with the sales teams on that, because I think it's the kind of thing that everybody can kind of nod sagely and academically when they're reading new york times. But I'm sure when you're sitting in a sales meeting it, you know it gets good fellows pretty fast. Where's my money? I don't care what the market's doing, where's my money? So I wonder how that's how that dynamic is playing out in in these rooms across hotel chains.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's a little too current events, but earnings calls are going on this week and last across the industry and I do think that across the business right now, a lot of companies, a lot of companies, most, if not all, have dropped their full year projection and I think part of that is that there's a tolerance for it built into the marketplace.
Speaker 2:Like our stock already got hammered, let's take down the expectation for the year, because everybody expects it, so then we can come in at the end of the year, beat guidance and maybe have some good wins. So I think there's some posturing going on, that it may not be as bad as people are letting on with current batch of earnings calls. So I do think that there's maybe we're creating our own silver lining, if you will. But the voluntary volatility is inexcusable and that just I'm passionate about. We talked about it with Aaron Ryan. There's no reason a business shouldn't be able to look six months out and know the rules of the game. That is inexcusable and until that stops, I don't think you're going to see anybody do other than what you're doing right now, which is say this is mind-blowingly stupid. We need to move forward, knowing what the rules of the game are.
Speaker 1:Okay. Is anybody brewing lemonade? And if, so can I visit them and have some, you may?
Speaker 2:You're welcome to go to Canada because they love that. Their demand is staying at home. Those hotels are doing just fine without sending their dollars, their Canadian loonies, over to us. So yeah, canada is doing well. Instead of outbound business, it's staying domestic. There are similarly winters in Latin America. Mexican travel to the US is down 7% for the year. That's benefiting somebody either still in Mexico or somewhere else in the Caribbean Latin American region, benefiting somebody either still in Mexico or somewhere else in the Caribbean Latin American region. Latin American region is benefiting from Canadians who are flying over the US instead of stopping here. Intra-european travel we saw this from Accor doing quite well, as Western Europeans have decided by double digit volumes not to come to the US this summer. Instead they're traveling within Europe. So there are winners. It's just not here in the US, jeff.
Speaker 1:this is great, let's do this very soon. We should do this again. I enjoy this, yeah, yeah, we should make a thing out of this. I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Great talking to you.