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ATLANTA — On the second day of the 2026 Hunter Hotel Investment Conference, hoteliers on stage continued some of the optimistic sentiments from the first day while zooming in on market trends they are most concerned about.
Taking the main stage were the annual "Wall Street talks" and "Main Street talks" panels that brought together investors and hotel owners to discuss their top concerns. Panelists were most focused on the hospitality industry continuing last year's slow-but-promising deals pace.
Later, hotel data experts took the spotlight to share some of the key data points that paint a picture of what's happening across the industry. For the most part, forecasts have been maintained from earlier in the year, and experts say only time will tell what the year — including the World Cup — will hold for hotel demand and performance.
Ultimately, the industry is a resilient one, as Thom Geshay, CEO and president of Davidson Hospitality, reminded everyone: "Hospitality will survive any shock, anytime. It always does."
Quotes of the day
"You factor noise into the underwriting."
—Mit Shah, founder and CEO of Noble Investment Group, spoke on the "Wall Street talks" panel about the realities of underwriting hotel deals amid geopolitical headwinds.
"We still get the question about comparing it to 2019, and I just want to make this one point. Room rates compared to 2019 were up in 2025 22%. That's great, except inflation was up 25%, so in real terms, room rates are now lower than they were pre-pandemic, down 3% or so. The same math obviously holds for RevPAR, and that's the problem that you're in."
—Jan Freitag, CoStar's national director of hospitality analytics, said at the "Key statistics shaping hospitality in 2026" panel that featured several data presentations.
“I think that with the larger pressures that we're seeing... we have to be relentless in every single part of what we do. It is no longer a group strategy. It's no longer a labor strategy. It's an everything strategy. Every day. You have to attack every market segment — you have to attack every distribution channel, you have to attack every group strategy, you have to attack everything on the food, beverage side — to make sure that you look at each one of your revenue lines, each one of your businesses and your P&L as a business itself to be profitable.”
—Thom Geshay, CEO and president of Davidson Hospitality, spoke on "The performance mandate" panel about current operating and ownership conditions.
Editors' takeaways
In my takeaway from the first day of the conference, I spoke about the resounding optimism I heard from hotel industry executives. The second day was the more of the same.
Whether it was executives speaking on panels or conversations I had with eventgoers in passing, the sentiment was the same: There are certainly headwinds present, but if you take a look at the big picture, things are good.
As Azim Saju, CEO of Ark Holdings, put it during the "Main Street talks" panel: "If there was no risk, there would be no rewards."
Hotel executives are willing to bet on their strategies and philosophies, whether it's in regard to hotel development or company culture. They often say this is a cyclical business, so even in the down times they can look ahead to the future for the light at the end of the tunnel.
— Trevor Simpson, staff writer/staff editor
"When Wall Street zigs, oftentimes Main Street will zag," said Vision Hospitality CEO Mitch Patel on the "Main Street talks" panel at the Hunter Conference on Tuesday. I think that sentiment really sums up the variables at play in the hotel industry today among different stakeholders. Institutional hotel investors are still weighing their options — particularly if they're choosing where to deploy investment among asset classes other than hotels — and real estate investment trusts are still on the sidelines.
But owners from smaller Main Street firms talked a lot about "patient capital," or the idea that the decisions they make about their equity contributions and overall investment need to be based on calculated risk so the deal gets done. While the Blackstones of the world still may not be sold on betting too big on hotel real estate again, the Main Street investors are determined to seize the day this year.
— Stephanie Ricca, editorial director
Today, I wanted to dig deeper on the optimism in the industry, and for the most part, I got it. CoStar's Jan Freitag said in his presentation for the statistics panel said that last month was the best February for hotel demand on record.
However, not everything was overly optimistic. In some of my conversations and on some of the panels I sat in on, I got a healthy dose of realism. Specifically, the hotel transaction market isn't as active as the hospitality industry hoped it would be, and the World Cup, which is less than 100 days out, isn't seeming like it's going to be as big of a boon as expected either. From the owner and operator side of things, the top concerns are with the margins and the bottom line — and that's just the new normal.
— Natalie Harms, reporter
The hotel industry is a peculiar business. It’s one where a single asset can have multiple hands in it: the owner of the real estate; the operator of the real estate; the brand affixed to the real estate. Oftentimes, each has competing motivations within that triangle: the owner wants profit; the operator pushes revenue; and the brand, well, it really wants to add more hotels. It’s seemingly diametric, but, somehow, has not only become the norm—it’s worked!
A similar sort of antithesis exists between institutional capital and private equity that gun for huge, often highly leveraged returns and smaller real estate firms firmly planted in hotel real estate investment with a tendency toward longer asset hold periods.
At the Hunter Conference, which swapped out its longtime location at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis for the Signia by Hilton Atlanta Georgia World Congress Center, disparities—and parities—between Wall Street’s notions of investment compared to Main Street’s were put under the microscope during two back-to-back panel discussions.
Street Smarts
Hotels are a unique asset class, as Mitch Patel, founder & CEO of Vision Hospitality Group, made clear—a service business that is layered atop real estate. This structure makes it decidedly different from other asset types. “Wall Street forgets this is a people business,” he said, adding that because hotels are a service business, and in an era of hyper transparency, people—those serving customers—have the ability to impact cash flow positively or negatively. “A 4.8 versus 4.0 rating can be the decider between success and mediocrity,” Patel said. “There are many levers to pull, unlike other asset classes.”
Fellow hotel owner Bo Patel, COO of Coury Hospitality, shared Patel’s view of how staffing a hotel has a direct impact on success and performance. “GSS [guest satisfaction scores] matter,” he said. “That gets lost. The customer isn’t just going to come.”
Main Street capital sometimes acts differently than institutional capital, Mitch Patel offered. Both invest with partners that fund these enterprises, but, as Patel suggested, not all investment partners are equal. “We have a disciplined model and patient capital,” he said, intimating that on Wall Street, money can be more restless. (The recent spate of private-capital investors wanting to pull their money out of funds is evidence of this.) Patel said that they look at deals through a different prism, with longer timelines, and with partners, who, he said, “have no pressure to get out.”
Private-equity groups like Blackstone had been rather quiet on the hotel acquisition front post-COVID, but in the last 16 months, Blackstone has made a series of hotel deals, including Four Seasons Hotel San Francisco, Kimpton Hotel Eventi in New York, three hotels in Japan, including The Ritz-Carlton, Okinawa, and EAST Miami. Last November, fellow private-equity giant Brookfield Asset Management scooped up the 1,003-room Sheraton Phoenix Downtown, the city’s biggest hotel. The seller was Blackstone.
Outside Control
These recent deals bode well for a headier transaction market through 2026 after a strong start to 2025, which was derailed in April by the so-named “Liberation Day,” when President Donald Trump initiated major tariff increases, as Scott Trebilco, senior managing director in the real estate group at Blackstone, alluded to. “There was optimism into into 2025,” he said. “Then April happened.”
The back half of 2025 picked up. “We were calculated and targeted,” Trebilco said. Blackstone, with its thematic investment ethos, homed in on assets in major urban cities, like New York, Miami and, bucking the trend, San Francisco, areas “with multiple demand drivers,” as Trebilco put it.
At the Americas Lodging Investment Summit, earlier this year, in Los Angeles, Mit Shah, CEO of Noble Investment Group, which invests in and owns hotels, said Noble’s fourth quarter was up 7%, which carried over into January 2025, when they were up 8%. “I was wildly optimistic,” he said. Then came DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative by the second Trump administration to modernize information technology, maximize productivity and cut excess regulations and spending within the federal government. “It took a significant amount of government travel out of the system almost immediately,” he said. “Then the Canadians started disliking us and then there was Liberation Day and a record government shutdown.”
Two months later, Shah is optimistic about RevPAR growth in 2026, despite most forecasters predicting flat to even negative growth. He is buoyed by events such as FIFA World Cup and America250.
On the deal side, Noble bucked the overall trend. Shah said Noble had its largest transactional year in 2025 in its 32-year history as a company. Hospitality, he said, is an eight-cap business where buyers can finance deals at SOFR-plus 200.
Karim Alibhai, founder and principal of Gencom, has been active; he’s been aggressive. One of its most recent acquisitions, in partnership with two other firms, was the InterContinental New York Times Square for a reported $230 million or just shy of $379,000 per key. A year ago, Gencom acquired The Ritz-Carlton, New Orleans and the Courtyard by Marriott French Quarter Iberville, a combined 758-room hotel portfolio in the city’s French Quarter.
“There has been some loosening up in the last 24 months,” he said. “Sellers are more realistic on pricing and valuations.” Despite more challenging underwriting, Gencom’s advantage is its preference of long-term asset holds. “We don’t have pressure of three-year IRR goals. We underwrite 10-year goals,” he said. “You factor the noise into the underwriting,” Shah added.
Christian Charnaux, CDO for Hilton, pointed to the resilience of the hotel industry despite the cost pressures that owners face down. “We are manically focused down the middle of the P&L,” said Trebilco, since its hotels aren’t managed by them.
The resilience theme is shared by Main Street, as voiced by Mitch Patel. “You couldn’t create policies less detrimental to our industry, but we still have positive gains,” he said.
Positivity in overall travel was a sentiment shared by Shah, who said that travel is innate within us all. And while the K-shaped economy has been an enduring theme, where high-income earners thrive and rise and lower-income households struggle, Shah said it’s starting to narrow. He also referred to the great wealth transfer, an unprecedented, multi-decade shift of an estimated up to $124 trillion in assets from baby boomers and the silent generation to their heirs (Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z). “When you pass down money they didn’t earn, they will spend it on travel,” Shah jokingly said.
Back on Main Street, Mitch Patel reminded the audience that the hotel industry is a corner-street business. And while it can be a risky business, as Azim Saju, CEO of ARK Holdings, said, those with conviction, belief and entrepreneurship are positioned to succeed. “Bet on yourself,” he said.
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