This Week in Hospitality

Scott is in Sicily, so Zach, Ben Wolff and Edwin Kramer take the docket. Edwin checks in from a new boutique hotel on Spain's Costa Blanca, and Ben is fresh from the glamping show. The first story: Hilton's CIO says AI assistants have put online travel agencies under real threat, yet he expects personal AI agents to become commissionable channels too. The crew asks what "direct" even means when an...

https://roompricegenie.com/ Checkout code for 25% off: WISH26   This Week’s Guest: Jennifer Barnwell - President, Curator Hotel & Resort Collection LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-barnwell-a8689ba/ Explore Curator Hotel & Resort Collection: https://www.curatorhotelsandresorts.com/team/jennifer-barnwell/ Your Host: Zach Busekrus - Journey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in...

https://roompricegenie.com/ Checkout code for 25% off: WISH26   This Week's Guest: Heidi Zimmer — Founder, Wild Rice Retreat Connect with Heidi: https://heidi-zimmer.com/ Explore Wild Rice Retreats: https://wildriceretreat.com/   Your Hosts: Zach Busekrus — Journey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/ Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera...

The full squad is back. Royal Caribbean is taking a 50% stake in Sandals Resorts for roughly $3 billion, and the crew breaks down why a cruise line wants an all-inclusive hotel brand. Edwin runs the numbers on who is really serving whose guests, and Scott, who has known the Stewart family most of his life, explains why cruise companies can't build ships fast enough and are coming ashore instead. T...

Fresh off Independent Hotel Show Miami, Zach and Ben break down two days of conversations with eight owners, operators, and investors from across independent hospitality. Before the full interviews roll out on This Week in Hospitality, this is the recap — the ideas that kept surfacing across every mic session, the moments that caught us off guard, and what these conversations say about where indep...

Blake Danner has spent his career inside the rooms where lifestyle hospitality was invented. Eleven years alongside Ian Schrager opening the Clift, Sanderson, and Shore Club. Seven years as founding COO of the Sydell Group, where he helped create Nomad, The Line, and Freehand — 11 hotels in seven years. A stint running operations at Proper Hospitality. And now, as COO of AKA Hotels & Hotel Res...

TikTok Go was supposed to turn creators into a hotel distribution channel. Instead, a Skift investigation found dozens of AI-generated fake videos attached to real properties — fabricated suites, nonexistent amenities, faceless accounts — with one Sedona luxury resort racking up 17 flagged videos. The kicker: the hotel doesn't even sell through TikTok Go's booking partners. Scott says forget the A...

Hotel sales in the US are up 28% in the first half of 2026 — and a meaningful chunk of that activity is chasing bad Yelp reviews, not trophy assets. JMI Realty founder Drew Bridges joins the show to break down how his firm is using AI to source acquisition targets off terrible guest feedback. The specific deal: a Hilton Garden Inn in Austin bought for $100K per key that reviewers called "janky" an...

On this week's episode the guys are joined by Alice Sherman, CEO of HVS Executive Search! Alice Sherman has placed some of the most powerful executives in hospitality. As CEO of HVS Executive Search, she's seen thousands of resumes, sat across from hundreds of owners, and walked the halls of Congress to lobby for the industry. Her message to the business? You're still hiring wrong.   Years of expe...

Airbnb just partnered with TripAdvisor to bring 425,000 experiences onto its platform — a move that signals Brian Chesky isn't just dabbling in experiences anymore, he's building a second business inside the first. The crew breaks down what this means for the future of in-destination travel, why the real unfair advantage might already be sitting inside every host's guidebook, and whether this is A...

This week we're joined by Sarah Kopit, Editor-in-Chief of Skift — the publication that fuels basically every episode of this show — and she came ready. We open on the story all of hospitality shared this week: Aman's brand-new, $6,000-a-night Amanvari turning away independent reviewer Ryan Walker at the gate on night two, then calling the cops on his driver. Scott and Sarah are inclined to give Am...

Sonder is back — sort of. Eight months after going bankrupt and stranding guests mid-stay, the brand name has been bought by a Vancouver affiliate firm that paid for one thing: search equity. The buildings are gone. The trademarks and 70+ domains remain. And because large language models still route travelers to Sonder’s optimized pages, that name is now targeting $100M in gross booking value over...

Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta went on record defending the brand's 28-property portfolio — and the panel has thoughts. Is the multi-brand arms race really about guests, or is it just an elaborate play for developers and distribution?  Edwin makes the case that independent hotels have a competitive advantage no loyalty algorithm can replicate. Scott drops the hottest take of the episode: loyalty points...

This week, the squad breaks down Norwegian Air's World Cup Instagram stunt that cost next to nothing and generated more brand equity than campaigns with budgets a hundred times the size. Eivind Hammer Myhre, who leads comms and marketing at Norwegian, joins us live to walk through exactly how it happened — the 25-minute brainstorm, the one phone call to get sign-off, and what came after when the w...

James McBride, Co-Founder & CEO of NIHI Hotels, joins the core four for a wide-ranging conversation on what it actually takes to build a legendary independent hospitality brand — from the jungles of Sumba to the halls of the Ritz-Carlton. James traces his career across some of the most storied names in luxury hospitality — Ritz-Carlton, Rosewood, the Carlisle, YTL — before partnering with Chri...

Zach, Scott, and Edwin dig into three stories reshaping the industry this holiday week. First: Skift's The Big Squeeze Part 2, which spotlights a family in Iowa who let their Wyndham franchise expire, renovated their Super Eight, and beat their old revenue numbers — no flag required. With 1,200+ economy agreements hitting end-of-term by 2030, the off-ramp is more viable than ever. Then: Bass Pro S...

Sean O'Neill of Skift joins the roundtable this week for a conversation that cuts straight to the fault lines running through the hotel industry right now — distribution versus identity, brand proliferation versus brand meaning, and the wellness promise versus wellness delivery. The panel leads with Pali Society's decision to bring its 16-property California portfolio into Marriott's Design Hotels...

This week opens in full TWIH chaos: Zach and Scott are somehow a mile apart in San Antonio and still not together, Ben is on the Connecticut shore debuting smarter-looking glasses, and Edwin is back in Barcelona sweating through a muted AC situation. Then the guys get into the real stories moving hospitality. CoStar and Tourism Economics upgrade 2026 RevPAR forecasts, but the panel is skeptical. L...

Two of the biggest casino operators in the world became takeover targets in the same week — and the squad has thoughts. Barry Diller's People Inc. just offered $18 billion to take MGM Resorts private, days after Fertitta agreed to buy Caesars. MGM's own CFO didn't argue the company was fairly valued — he argued investors aren't doing the work. Ben, Scott, and Edwin debate whether public markets ar...

This week opens at LE Miami — which Scott describes less like a travel conference and more like Coachella for hotel nerds — before the guys dive into the real industry tension underneath the party. Hyatt tells investors to stop counting rooms and start counting fees, arguing that “empty calorie” growth is the wrong metric. But the panel digs into the contradiction: the premium story is Park Hyatt,...

Mews embeds Uber directly into its PMS, promising seamless guest transportation and a cut of ancillary revenue hotels have long been leaving on the table. The guys are skeptical — cool concept, questionable adoption, and the real winner might just be Uber’s data team. Then Expedia announces B2A — a marketing function built not for humans, but for AI agents. Scott doesn’t mince words: AI is about t...

This week, Zach, Ben, and Edwin dig into the race to own the entire trip. Airbnb’s summer release becomes the main event: rental cars, boutique hotels, Instacart, airport pickups, luggage storage, landmark experiences, and aggressive travel credits. The crew debates whether this is finally Airbnb’s super-app moment — or whether the company still can’t decide if it wants to be a homes platform or t...

This week, the guys trace one tension running through travel right now: everyone wants scale, but nobody wants the experience to feel scaled.   Airbnb opens the conversation with Brian Chesky admitting what most travel CEOs won’t say out loud: AI still hasn’t figured out travel. The panel digs into why chatbots don’t solve discovery, why travel planning is visual, emotional, and often multiplayer...

The hospitality industry was supposed to print money during the 2026 World Cup. Instead, nearly 80% of hotels across the eleven US host cities are pacing significantly below forecasts, with Kansas City operators calling it a non-event and Boston, Philly, and San Francisco not far behind. On this week's episode, Zach is joined by Edwin Kramer, Scott Eddy, and Ben Wolff to unpack what went wrong — v...

This week’s conversation pulls apart a reality the industry has been circling for months—but is now impossible to ignore: travel demand is no longer being created, shaped, or captured by the companies that actually deliver the experience. It’s happening upstream. What starts as a discussion around TikTok and AI quickly evolves into something bigger—a structural shift in how travelers decide. Disco...