So I've now had a couple of weeks since the 2025 Americas Lodging Investment Summit to digest everything I saw and heard at the hotel industry's annual hotel industry new year's kickoff bash in Los Angeles. And my takeaway so far is: The optimism this year is palpable.
Now you might be saying to yourself, "But Sean, isn't it that every single year, with the full calendar ahead of them and a reliable 'glass-half-full' mentality that hoteliers gather to say this is truly going to be their year?" And the answer to that question is most definitely yes.
This year, ALIS was once again a hotel industry love fest, celebrating the fact that with the calendar shift, hope once again springs eternal. But there are some years you can tell and feel that the optimism of the event is a bit more forced.
Sure it was a similar refrain: More deals! More demand! All the good things we're seeing for the industry will continue forever, and all the bad things will go away before we reconvene in New York in June.
But I feel like, at least for the people I talked to, that sense of optimism was more genuine than a mask of hope meant to hide their anxieties.
At the same time, I left Los Angeles with a feeling that lingers with me today, and that's just this vague thought of how we still really don't know where we're headed. There was certainly a lot of talk about there being more "certainty" around the industry, particularly with the presidential election behind us. But I look out at the news landscape of the first month and a half of 2025 and see "certainty" in precious short supply.
Now that earnings season is in high gear, it seems like more and more of the hotel brands are coalescing around the idea of a good if not great year for demand and revenue growth. something in the range of 2% or 3% revenue-per-available-room growth would be welcome but underwhelming.
But what do we do with that information? How does that change people's ability to do deals with interest rates seemingly going to linger in a higher range for longer? All the renovations and debt maturities that are definitely going to force deals this year — didn't we have a good bit of that last year?
I don't really like to position myself in the role of the pessimist, but the more words I type out here, the more it feels like just what I'm doing. Either way, I too think this could be a better year than 2024, at least in some ways. But is that a measure of getting through a year many will ultimately look back on as underwhelming or is it truly a matter of 2025 being a good year even in a vacuum?
Maybe the answer doesn't matter in the end. The hotel industry, like all of our society, doesn't exist in a vacuum, so good will always be a relative descriptor. So lets hope this is as good of a year for you and yours as we all seem to hope it will be.
Let me know what you think on LinkedIn or via email.
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