MONDAY, JULY 20, 2026

Good morning, and congratulations to Spain and its supporters. The World Cup helped drive RevPAR up 5.2% year over year in the latest CoStar report, with host cities leading the increase. More on that and more today.

Congrats to Dani Stern on becoming president of hospitality operations at Black Desert Resort, Spiridon Sarantopoulos on becoming SVP of operations for Europe and the USA at Indian Hotels Company, and Pascha Bhatti on becoming general manager of W New York Union Square.

PODCAST

The Unexpected Joy of a Career in Hospitality - Christina Poon (11 min) The thing that keeps guests coming back, Christina Poon says, is still the people who greet them. Poon, general manager of the soon-to-open Detroit EDITION, tells Josiah how an unexpected career recommendation pulled her into hospitality, and why she started writing on LinkedIn to show aspiring leaders what the job actually involves, from the human connection to the daily reality of running a hotel.

Six in ten summer travelers have booked a hotel specifically because of its restaurant, says OpenTable. The reservations platform's data, released alongside its 2026 Top 100 Hotel Restaurants list, shows traveler dining at hotel restaurants up 13% year over year, with the behavior running deeper than the meal: 88% of Gen Z travelers plan restaurant reservations before their trip, 46% are weighing them at the same moment they book the room, 92% of respondents have dined at a hotel restaurant without staying there, and Matt Davis, OpenTable's head of North America hotels, calls the restaurant "the anchor" of the trip. Read more on Hotel Dive

Guests worldwide are more satisfied, and hotels are answering them faster. Shiji's Q2 benchmark puts its Global Review Index at 87.3%, up 0.4 points from a year ago, with management response rates at 67.2%, average response time down to 3.7 days, and Booking.com and Google now accounting for more than 62% of global review volume, concentrating most of that response work in just two queues. Read more via Shiji

The jobs AI can actually do in travel barely overlap with the jobs that are hard to staff. Skift founder Rafat Ali built a dataset of 37 US travel occupations, matched it against three measures of AI exposure, and plotted the results against workforce age. His finding on the overlap between AI-exposed jobs and retirement-pressured jobs: "the answer is almost none." Customer service, reservations, and marketing roles, the ones AI handles best, have far younger workforces, while housekeeping, kitchens, and transportation, where 32% to 48% of workers are 55 or older, are the jobs AI is least equipped to touch. The gap is measurable: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 941,000 open leisure and hospitality jobs at the end of May, and Skift Research pegs average hospitality tenure at two years. Read more on Skift

Striking Seattle hotel workers are collecting unemployment under one of the first state laws that lets strikers claim it, a change in the economics of a walkout. About 90% of the 117 workers on strike at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Pioneer Square have applied under Washington's SB 5041, which took effect January 1 and pays strikers up to six weeks of benefits, per UNITE HERE Local 8, with payments expected to begin the week of July 20. The walkout began June 18 after contract talks with Hilton stalled, and Hilton says it remains "committed to negotiating in good faith." Statewide, 142 striking workers have already collected nearly $506,000 this year under the law, per the state Employment Security Department, in one of only a handful of states that let strikers draw unemployment at all. For operators in union markets, that state backstop lengthens how long a picket line can hold before the money runs out. Read more on KOMO News

Business travel is doing the growing this year: corporate travel volume rose 13.5% in the first half while leisure grew just 0.5%, per Navan's H1 benchmark, whose travel index hit a record 189.1. Hotel bookings on the platform rose 11.1%, with international hotel bookings up 9.8%, and spending climbed faster than travel itself, with domestic travel spend up 21.5% on an 8.8% rise in volume and premium cabin bookings up 17% domestically. Professional services firms led the surge at 44.6%, the sharpest gain of any category tracked. The corporate guest your negotiated rates were written for is traveling more, booking more hotel nights, and spending more per trip, and Navan reads the first-half data as corporate travel pulling clearly ahead of a nearly flat leisure segment. Read more on Asian Hospitality

The wholesale room you sell to fill a soft Tuesday now helps build a bank's loyalty program, not yours. In an analysis for Hospitality.today, Markus Busch traces where a net rate travels once it leaves the property. Rocket Travel by Agoda, a Booking Holdings brand, bundles group supply and third-party inventory into a single connection that any checkout can plug into, and that connection already powers Citi's cardholder travel site, American's AAdvantage Hotels, and Southwest Hotels. When the room sells inside a bank or airline app, Busch notes, the folio comes back with no guest email, no enrollment that means anything, and no direct rebook next year, because the traveler earns points somewhere else. Busch's read for operators is that the familiar fight over rate leakage understates the real cost, which is the guest relationship the channel keeps, and that the on-property stay is now where a hotel does its own re-acquisition. Read more on Hospitality.today

U.S. hotel RevPAR rose 5.2% year over year to $112.18 for the week ending July 11, with the World Cup still setting the pace in host markets. Occupancy reached 67.6%, up 0.7%, and average daily rate rose 4.5% to $166.04, per CoStar. Among the top 25 markets, Miami led on the England-Norway quarterfinal, with ADR up 37.6% to $232.47 and RevPAR up 38.0% to $157.00, while Boston, host of the France-Morocco quarterfinal, posted the second-largest ADR gain at 21.8% to $279.21. Detroit reported the biggest occupancy jump, up 9.3% to 70.2%, and Las Vegas ran RevPAR up 23.9% on the World Series of Poker and a large convention. The national RevPAR gain held at 5.2%, well below those host-market spikes. Read more via CoStar

Hotel and resort REITs were the top-performing property sector through the first half of 2026, according to Nareit, as REITs overall beat the broader stock market after three years of disappointing returns, with CoStar's Dani Romero reporting that higher rates and excess supply are beginning to fade. For hotel investors benchmarking asset values against other real estate asset classes and investment vehicles, this is welcome information. Read more on CoStar