Good morning. Sports fans are traveling for games they have no intention of attending, and hotels are putting televisions on the roof to serve them. In other news, Wyndham told investors that roughly 60% of its guests' travel searches now happen inside a large language model.

Congrats to Eduardo Schutte on being named SVP, Commercial for Hyatt's Inclusive Collection, its all-inclusive business of more than 150 resorts.

PODCAST

What I'm Learning From AI Companies as a Hotel Leader - Christina Poon, Detroit EDITION (7 min) The general manager of the soon-to-open Detroit EDITION says a lesson worth learning from AI companies is their pace of continuous improvement, which she calls the hardest thing to introduce in a business where the answer to too many questions is “this is how it has always been done.”

Sports fans are now traveling to host cities for games they never intend to attend, and hotels are capturing that demand. CoStar's Trevor Simpson reports on “tailgate tourism,” driven by ticket prices most fans cannot reach: the World Cup final's secondary-market access hit $9,500, and NBA Finals seats in New York averaged $7,000. New York RevPAR rose 14.3% and 15.4% on the two nights the city hosted Finals games. Peter Yeung of the Walker Hotels Collection put three televisions on a rooftop bar and one in a lobby ahead of the Finals and filled the bar. "You want to be around people that have that same interest," he said. Z Hotel NYC general manager David Roman markets his rooftop the same way, and he finds the impact shows up as room demand. Read more on CoStar

A guest can be rude while your team member cannot, and that gap is where training belongs. Experience designer Miranda Allison, founder of Pretty Darn Delightful, calls it role asymmetry: "the psychological imbalance created by the different expectations placed on each role." It takes far more before a company decides a guest is not worth serving than before an employee faces consequences. "Ownership should not mean assuming responsibility for everything that happens during an interaction," she writes. "Instead, it means taking responsibility for what is within your control." Something worth taking into your day: "Without authority, ‘ownership’ becomes an unrealistic expectation." Read more on Hospitality Net

A night auditor's account of what happened after cameras replaced her colleague is worth reading to understand what it feels like to work in a lean operation. On Reddit, a night auditor at a 200-room airport hotel writes that the property ran two people overnight until "end of last year they installed CCTV allowing for one night auditor," and that when her counterpart fell ill long-term, "for the company this worked out perfectly." Her work still covered check-ins, registration data entry, end-of-day processing, next-day reservations, billing checks, bar service, restocking, deliveries, and breakfast prep. Two impacts ended up on the P&L without being traced back to the staffing decision: she closes the bar on weekends and group nights because she cannot run it alone safely, and every maintenance call or request for a blanket empties the front desk, which is why she now refuses to go upstairs at all. Read more on Reddit

American summer travelers are planning trips with AI. Allianz Partners' Global Travel Confidence Index, polling 2,001 American adults with Ipsos between March 20 and April 14, found 37% using AI for destination and restaurant recommendations, itinerary building and budget planning, though neither that survey nor Wyndham's numbers below are (yet) showing where those searches convert. Read more on Hotel Dive

The clause in your franchise agreement nobody negotiated may be the one that decides who owns your reviews. Markus Busch at Hospitality.today tells the story of Gary Patel, who ran a hotel in Searcy, Arkansas under Choice brands from 2008 and relaunched it as the Magnolia in April. When he went to update the Google listing, 579 reviews and a 4.4 rating built over eighteen years, it came back marked permanently closed, because the brand controls the profile and Google treats reviews as belonging to the profile rather than the operator. Google declined to transfer it; the only route runs through a brand portal a former franchisee cannot access. The Magnolia is now at 29 reviews, which is also the record an AI model reads when deciding whether to recommend it. Busch's suggestion is to pull up your own listing and find out whose account controls it. Read more on Hospitality.today

Hotel results are named in a European ruling on how Google ranks its own services, alongside shopping, transport and sports. The July 23 decision fined Google 460 million euros after finding it "gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties," displaying them at the top of the page or with visuals and filters competing services do not get. Google must now apply "transparent, fair and non-discriminatory conditions" to that ranking and end the non-compliance, and a second decision over Google Play brought the day's total to 890 million euros. The Commission did not describe what a compliant hotel results page looks like, so the layout your rooms compete on is about to change in ways nobody has published yet. Read more via the European Commission

Wyndham raised its full-year outlook and told investors that roughly 60% of its guests' travel searches now happen inside a large language model. U.S. RevPAR rose 2% in the second quarter on better occupancy and rate, while global RevPAR fell 1% on a 6% international decline, and the company lifted full-year guidance to flat-to-up-1%. System size and pipeline each grew 4%, with a record second quarter of openings at nearly 18,000 rooms. CEO Geoff Ballotti credited Texas, Florida, California and what he called the industrial Midwest, where hotels in "project adjacent markets" are serving transportation, AI, data center and industrial projects. On search, he said "roughly 60% of travel searches by our guests are occurring within an LLM" for inspiration, research or itinerary building, and framed Wyndham's native ChatGPT app as a direct booking play. Read more on Hotel Dive

Records were made in the U.S. hotel pipeline last quarter. Lodging Econometrics counted 5,975 projects and 703,001 rooms at the end of the second quarter, with conversions at an all-time high of 1,567 projects, luxury at a record 103, and upper-upscale at a record 367; new project announcements grew fastest of all, up 18%, so the conversion boom is running alongside new construction rather than replacing it. Read more on Hotel Business

Park Hotels expects a $100 million renovation to nearly double one hotel's EBITDA. The REIT finished the work at the Royal Palm South Beach in Miami across 404 guestrooms and four new food and beverage concepts, and says it has put more than $430 million into return-driven projects since 2018, "consistently generating returns in excess of 15% to 20% once projects stabilize.” Read more via Park Hotels & Resorts