Travel down, Costs too, AI plans travel & more!
July 2025
TLDR: Too Long Didn’t Read
Hotels are striking back at Airbnb’s over tourism claims 🏨⚔️, pointing out that short-term rentals in Spain grew 135% vs. 2.5% overall tourism 📈🇪🇸. Motel One was mostly sold and aims to double its hotels in 10 years 🏨↗️. Booking is trialing AI-powered “Connected Trips” 🤖✈️, while ChatGPT now offers agentic features to book and manage tasks 🤖📲. Global hotel performance dips (ADR, RevPAR, occupancy) 📉, except luxury chains 💎🏨, while construction costs ease slightly 🏗️📊. Hilton survey reveals travelers act spontaneously and fear missing out 😎⚡, though business travel remains sluggish due to costs and admin 💼📉. Hospitality REITs track market trends 🏢📈. New resources highlight GDS fees 💳, digital accessibility ♿, executive hiring 👔, USALI budgeting 📊, and cyber-resilience 🛡️.
0. News snippets
Not important enough to expand on, but worth hearing about
Where do we check the validity of sources? The free tool we use to do so is mediabiasfactcheck.com | Tired of taking the train to North Korea? No worries, Russia launched the “first” commercial passenger flight there.
0.5 Follow up
Where we follow up on news from previous weeks
Hotels strike back!
In June Airbnb blamed hotels for over tourism. In July the hotels strike back! With a variety of their own statistics and FACTS. Head of Melia, Accor’s PR team, and a few others have responded. Apparently, while tourism grew 2.5% in Spain last year, it grew 135% within the Short-Term-Rental sector. The battle continues. Solutions until than? Close everything and never travel again for tourist purposes, especially to Barcelona. More here.
Motel one was sold, now they will double
Motel One, Germany’s leading home bred hotel chain, was sold recently (at least 80% of it). Owner stayed as a director though. Now? The plan is to double their hotel count from 100 to 200 in 10 years. Mostly in Germany, but also worldwide. Reaching greatness one hotel at a time.
1. Big Players
Core news related to hospitality chains
Booking integrating AI for “Connected Trips”
Remember that lovely person inside a tourism office? Selling you trip packages to far away places? A picture of some beach behind them, all-inclusive trips. Nothing to worry about and of course “personalized” towards your needs (and many millions more). Well Booking is going to try to replicate that with AI. Their offer of “connected trips” has apparently reached low but still double digit share of their total number of bookings. Putting a little AI bot to help you out might boost the whole thing even more!
2. Travel tech
Core news related to the industry
AI is now doing real life actions for you
AI can now be agentic. OpenAI has released a chatgpt agent feature. You can tell it what to do and it will go online and start taking actions. Including making guest reservations or filling out some forgotten spreadsheet. The feature was demoed in the beginning of 2025, but now YOU can use it for just 20 bucks per month. The only question remains, who will you complain to, when you get booked into a bed bug ridden property on the outskirts of the city? Yourself of course, dummy. Should have written a better prompt.
3. Industry Trends
Core news related to the industry
RevPar, occupancy and ADR down globally (you are not alone)
Ever wonder how well are you performing compared to others? BUT don’t have a huge budget to subscribe to a live data pool? Fear not, for STR releases weekly market reports. US only and partially for global regions, but still. What happened in July? ADR down, RevPar down several weeks in the raw. Even globally occupancy decreased. Weekends weren’t as bad, but still decreased. Only segment that saw an increase were luxury chains. “Poor” people seem to not want to travel as much.
Cost Survey by HVS
HVS has also released a cost survey for 2025. While construction cost of hotels has still increased in 2024, the cost inflation has decreased to 3-4%. RevPar and Adr on the other hand have increased 1-2% depending on what metric you look. As a result it “makes more sense” to build hotels again. Finally the article provides current average and median costs of hotel development from land to refurb. For those who care about metrics, go here.
Hilton surveys 13 thousand lucky travelers
Hilton released a report form June based on 13 thousand surveys. Any learning’s? 78% of people are taking holidays “spontaneously”. 75% feel FoMo when traveling and 68% have an itinerary. Overall the report goes into various target groups, spending patterns and more. Check out the full report here. 55% by the way, want to not think about money when on holiday, meaning 55% are thinking about money when on holiday.
Hotel Associations happy about “The Big Beautiful Bill”
AHLA was very happy about the big beautiful bill by Trump. Why? Tax reforms that provide stability for SME properties. There are always several sides of the coin to any issue. More here.
Business travel survey pessimistic?
In the spirit of reports this month, another one was released. Specifically business travel. NOT DOING WELL. Why? Sellers are seeing a further decrease in demand, buyers are planning less. Top 2 reasons were high travel cost and increased administrative burdens. Next comes safety and even border detentions. Maybe all just excuses to jump on a zoom call instead of taking a plane somewhere? Who knows. More results here.
4. Hospitality Academia
Scientific papers from the sector. For those who want to know for sure ;)
Hospitality REITs vs the Market
A quite an exciting study was released in July. Specifically on the topic of Hospitality REITs (Real Investment Trusts). Here is the abstract of the abstract. Hospitality REITs go hand in hand with overall market situation, meaning you are not diversifying yourself from risk when investing in hospitality, you are just attaching yourself to a pretty good indicator of the economy. The data does include revenues from outside of COVID, however only 8 REITs that are publicly traded were looked at. Not a very diversified pool of data but still. Want to make money when others don’t? Don’t buy hotels. (on average)
5. Readables
Books, podcasts & the big stuff.
Tourism Economics
Another month another book. If you want to do a deep dive into tourism economics including financials, strategies and case studies, a recent academic book was released. “Tourism Economics: Financial Inclusion, Performance Strategies, and Case Studies”. An exciting read after a long week of doing check-ins.
6. Tips & Tricks Tools & SaaS
Any new software you can use? Industry tricks you missed?
GDS networks and commission fees
How do hotels keep GDS commission fees low? The answer lies in being a big chain that started before the 2010s. You are not in the list too bad. Just kidding. Here more.
How to make your site “Digitally Accessible”
Here a rather unique take on accessibility. Not just the wheel chair kind, but a digital one. How do you make your hotel website digitally accessible to those who can’t use your website in the regular way? Quite an interesting article referring to specific legal guidelines that need to be followed “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2”. Here the link that you can use to see whether your site complies. Full source here.
Hiring basics
Hiring is so easy right? Well, no? Here a useful guideline we found on hiring executives for your hotel business. From writing job descriptions to training your hiring staff.
Hotel Budgeting with USALI 12
No idea how to budget for 2026 or any period for that matter. Here a useful guideline going into benchmarks and USALI standards (12th edition). As always this articles are sponsored by who ever posted them, but you can still extract some useful information with out falling for any sales tactics. Missing information? Just ask ChatGPT (and always double check)
Cyber-Resilience via 5 steps
Ever got hacked? Well a casino in Las Vegas did, resulting in a total loss of 145 Million USD. Specifically via social engineering. Somebody somewhere tricked someone into giving access to data that they shouldn’t. Following article provides basic 5 steps (or at least 3 basic steps) on how to prevent it. Read it for your own good.