In an article published a few years ago here, I explored whether the hospitality industry is truly facing a talent shortage or experiencing a structural opportunity to rethink how talent is developed, retained and deployed. Since then, market conditions have only reinforced that conclusion: Workforce readiness is no longer a secondary operational concern. It is becoming a material variable in hotel investment performance.
The United Kingdom hotel sector has now experienced multiple years where the focus on negative yielding has created a challenging environment affecting hotel performance across the sector; this is only reinforced by the performance data published for 2024 and 2025.
Several pieces of news coming out of the United Kingdom and mainland Europe this week have caught the attention of the news-reading public, and they have ramifications for the hotel industry, some more than the others.
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.