This Passenger Did Something So Gross, You’ll Never Want to Cruise Again
This Passenger Did Something So Gross, You’ll Never Want to Cruise Again
A Vision/Unsplash
https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/cruise-passenger-uses-fork-to-scratch-foot-in-the-dining-room
And more of this week's top news.
This week in travel, we have several stories that may have flown under your radar. Among them: Denmark is educating tourists on how to handle wolf encounters; two tourists are facing backlash after ignoring signs and walking off trail at Yellowstone National Park; and a cruise passenger’s shocking act of scratching her foot with a fork has gone viral.
Dive into these and more as we examine the latest in travel news.
PHOTO: Nick Karvounis/Unsplash
1 OF 5
Denmark to Tourists: Watch Out for Wolves
Denmark shared advice for tourists on how to act during an encounter with wolves. Among the suggestions, tourists are advised to stay calm, make noise, and keep eye contact.
Authorities distributed fliers to tourist campsites, holiday homes, and tourist offices in German, Danish, and English. Although it is rare for wolves to approach humans, it is a possibility. The wolf population has risen to 49 in the Jutland peninsula after a 200-year absence.
“There have been no wolf attacks on people in Denmark, but should it happen, you must defend yourself by all means: hit, kick, and use any object at hand. If a wolf attacks another person or your dog, aim your blows and kicks at the wolf’s hindquarters. Do not go between the wolf and the victim,” the flier says. People are also told not to follow them or leave the car if they come close to the vehicle.
2 OF 5
Tourists Walk Dangerously Close to 188-Degree Yellowstone Hot Spring
Disregarding all warnings and common sense, two tourists were captured walking on the banks of Yellowstone National Park’s hot spring on July 18. The pair were dangerously walking across the Grand Prismatic Spring, which is forbidden. The National Park Service recommends that people stay on the designated trails and do not scratch the mat. “Hydrothermal water can severely burn you.”
The Grand Prismatic Spring is the largest hot spring in the park, spanning 200 to 330 feet. It is more than 121 feet deep and reaches a temperature of 188°F. The fragile crust is thin with boiling water underneath, and falling can be deadly. Last year, a bison died after falling through it.
PHOTO: PHOTO: STATE OF ALASKA/CHRIS MCLENNAN
3 OF 5
Bear Dies on Pole in New Mexico
Last Monday, a bear was seen atop a utility pole in a remote area of New Mexico. Shannon Mulles recorded video of the black bear panting heavily, and her fiancé called 911. Authorities said they couldn’t take action because the bear might fall if they tried to tranquilize or coax it down. Tragically, the bear was electrocuted on its way down and died before conservation officers arrived.
The New Mexico Department of Wildlife said it received calls about the bear and advised people to leave it alone, as it would climb down when ready. “However, some members of the public continued to stop next to the power pole to film and take pictures of the bear, so the bear remained at the top of the pole,” it said in a statement.
The department also noted that the bear climbed the pole after being spooked, similar to how it would climb a tree in a forest. It was up there for an hour and a half. The best thing the public can do in these cases is to leave the wildlife alone, the agency said.
4 OF 5
Cruise Passenger Uses Fork to Scratch Itch in Public
Cruises are not for the faint-hearted. In a recently viral video, a passenger was seen using a fork to scratch her foot in the dining area. The shocking video series starts with the woman scratching her bare foot in the dining hall; in the next part, she uses a fork from the table on her foot. The Instagram user also shared a conversation with a staff member as she informed them about the incident.
Carnival Cruise later confirmed that they had removed the utensil from service and joked that “forks are intended for food, not foot care.”
PHOTO: BRASILNUT1/ISTOCK
5 OF 5
EasyJet Flight Returns After Brawl Involving 10 Passengers
Last Tuesday, an EasyJet flight from Tenerife to Liverpool was forced to return 30 minutes after takeoff. The air traffic controller recalled that a group of 10 people started a fight and the pilot requested the flight turn around for the safety of everyone onboard. “We expedited their return as much as possible while coordinating with the airport for police presence.”
The flight was met by police upon return and then continued to Liverpool. There were 186 passengers on the flight. The airline confirmed the incident and said that the safety of its passengers and crew is a top priority. “We take these incidents very seriously and do not tolerate disruptive behavior towards our staff.”
Hilton sees strong underlying performance amid macroeconomic 'noise'
Revenue per available room up 3.9% year-over-year in the second quarter
In April, Hilton opened the Conrad Athens The Ilisian in Athens, Greece. (Hilton)
https://www.costar.com/article/1121811960/hilton-sees-strong-underlying-performance-amid-macroeconomic-noise?
While Hilton's momentum this year has been buoyed by relatively easy comparisons and World Cup-driven performance, President and CEO Chris Nassetta said the underlying run rate is strong and indicative of a healthy travel environment.
"There's a lot of noise in this year," Nassetta said on the company's second-quarter earnings call. "There's some negative noise, which is largely oriented towards the Middle East, a little bit of Mexico, and then there's a lot of positive noise, if you will, between easier comps broadly and World Cup."
In the U.S., Hilton's revenue per available room growth in the second quarter was around 5.4%. Nassetta said that about half of that increase is "real run rate growth" while the other half was comps and World Cup momentum.
While the third quarter will continue to see positive gains from these factors, "when you look at the year, ... we think it looks a lot like the first half of the year when you take out the noise of comps and World Cup," Nassetta said.
Hilton's second-quarter performance exceeded expectations, executives said on the call, and the company also posted historic net unit growth. Nassetta said Hilton signed around 43,000 new hotel rooms in the second quarter, making it the second-largest quarterly signings in the company's history. More than 70% of those signings were international, and notable hotel openings included Conrad Athens The Ilisian, Waldorf Astoria Miami Beach and Hilton's first Curio hotel in the Bahamas.
Conversions accounted for 36% of the openings for Hilton last quarter, but Nassetta pointed to a strong development pipeline as well.
"Our pipeline now stands at a record 541,000 rooms, spanning more than 130 countries. Almost half of the pipeline is under construction, positioning Hilton for sustained 6% to 7% net unit growth as we continue to capture a bigger slice of a growing global pie," Nassetta said.
In terms of hotel demand mix, business transient is strong and being led by small-to-medium-sized businesses, which is outpacing big corporate travel, Nassetta said.
"We continue to see really good strength in midweek business transient — really good strength in SMB," he said. "I think this C-shaped thing's alive and well, and, personally, I think it's sustainable, just based on the basic laws of economics."
Leisure performance is trailing behind business and group, and Nassetta said leisure RevPAR was up 1.6%, "exceeding expectations but offset by unfavorable holiday shifts and pressure from the conflict in the Middle East."
Other quarter highlights for Hilton include its "industry-first" partnership with travel management platform Navan and the launch of Hilton Rise, a program that gives owners a discount on fees as they deliver on certain performance metrics. Nassetta said the program is a result of listening and understanding the tough environment hotel owners have been operating in and recognizing that conditions are improving.
"I think things are going in a really good direction, where my belief is owners are going to get margin growth and that we're going to get into a different cycle," he said. "But the reality is they've had a more challenging time."
By the numbers
Hilton saw system-wide comparable RevPAR increase 3.9% year over year in the second quarter and posted $482 million net income, according to its earnings release.
"Growth was driven by underlying demand recovery in the U.S. where business transient and growth both exceeded expectations and a strong World Cup," said Kevin Jacobs, Hilton's executive vice president and chief financial officer.
Year to date, Hilton has repurchased over $2 billion of its stock.
Hilton again raised its full-year outlook across metrics, including raising its anticipated year-over-year RevPAR increase to between 3% and 3.5%, compared to last earnings call's projection of 2% to 3%. Net income is expected to be around the same as predicted earlier this year — around $1.9 billion.
In the third quarter, Hilton expects a system-wide comparable RevPAR growth of 4% when compared to the third quarter of 2025.
As of press time, Hilton's stock was trading at $321.74 a share, up 9.8% year to date. The NYSE composite is up 8.8% year to date.
Optimism for hotel deals builds for second half of 2026
Hold strategies, debt costs, and interested capital are among the myriad of drivers for sales
U.S. hotel deal experts believe there's more to come in the second half of 2026. The pending $279 million sale of the 821-key Hyatt Regency San Francisco is expected to close during the third quarter. (CoStar)
https://www.costar.com/article/14983575/optimism-for-hotel-deals-builds-for-second-half-of-2026?
By Bryan Wroten
The U.S. hotel transaction market this year has mostly built on the momentum it clawed together in the second half of 2025.
Buyers and sellers are still working together, slowly narrowing the bid-ask gap and finding ways to close, even if the path forward has its stops and starts.
LW Hospitality Advisors’ latest records of individual transactions priced at $10 million at above shows 107 transactions during the second quarter, down from 110 in the first quarter. Total sales volume for this second quarter was nearly $3.8 billion, down from $4.6 billion the quarter before, and price per key decreased from $263,000 to $229,000. The average sales prices also dropped from $41.8 million to $35.3 million.
Even so, the numbers mostly surpass figures from a year ago. During the second quarter of 2025, there were 89 individual deals of more than $10 million in price for a total value of $3.3 billion, amounting to an average sales price of $37.1 million and a price per key of $225,000.
In a written assessment of these figures, LWHA Co-Founder, President and CEO Daniel Lesser said the market has shown “remarkable resilience” in light of macro volatility, namely the escalating Middle East war, a bifurcated domestic economy and persistently elevated borrowing costs.
“A comprehensive analysis of nearly 10 years of U.S. hotel single-sale transaction data indicates that activity has not materially declined,” he wrote. “Rather, it has shifted in structure, composition and pricing dynamics.”
Overall, it feels more like a market-selling environment, said Dustin Fisher, principal and head of acquisitions for institutional real estate investment manager Noble Investments Group. That’s primarily due to fund or partnership resolution issues, mandated sales or capital expenditure needs.
“That being said, I think we came into the year with as bleak of a set of full-year outlooks as you could ask for and could not have been more wrong,” he said. “So, I do think you're finding sellers recalibrate in real time on better-than-expected results.”
Noble invests in hotels throughout the industry cycle, but Fisher said he’s not sure when the company's leadership team has been more bullish on the sector than it is currently.
There are several secular tailwinds helping the industry, and many continue to be overlooked as a major catalyst compared with other real estate categories, he said. For one, there’s the supply backdrop along with the increase in business travel, a yet-to-be realized stimulus spending package and an unprecedented wealth transfer that’s coming into the largest traveling demographic.
A look at the market
There’s an atypical number of luxury hotels on the market, and that is somewhat attributable to the segment’s performance, Fisher said. The tailwinds associated with luxury is attracting a preponderance of the capital, but there have also been two “somewhat abnormal portfolio sellers” who are providing a solid amount of luxury hotels to meet the capital demand.
There’s also a lot of upscale and upper-upscale legacy product that’s mostly from the unwinding of institutional portfolios from the prior cycle that are coming to the point of resolving themselves, he said.
The portfolio opportunities seen immediately after the pandemic and the then-capital markets tailwinds have not re-emerged, he said.
When looking over what deals closed in the second quarter, Lesser said in an interview that along with some headline-grabbing sales, there were many transactions between $10 million and $50 million.
“There's no shortage of trades at $100 million-plus, but there is also a lot of trades at the $10 million to $50 million range,” he said.
While there’s a lot of interest right now in luxury deals because of the segment’s performance, the contrarian bet would be to pursue hotels at the lower end of the chain scale, he said.
“The price per unit for the middle down is more suppressed than it is for anything above that,” he said.
In terms of what’s on the market, there’s a good deal of value-add, basis and yield opportunities out there, and they’re across a fairly broad spectrum of the chain scales, Fisher said. What’s different about the transaction market now is that in the past few years, there has been a lot of direct engagement between sellers and buyers for bespoke, off-the-market transactions.
Partly because of the overall performance as well as the macro backdrop for hotels have led to environment for more broadly marketing properties for sale, he said. Sellers want to make sure they’re capturing the newer entrants to the market, the generalists investors who have been out for a bit.
Also, owner/operators who have focused more on development are now focusing more on deals because of the cost to develop, he said.
“So, disposition processes are benefiting from a more broad marketing approach versus what we’d characterize as an off-market, bespoke approach last year — probably the last 24 months.”
Pricing of deals
Pricing is still a constant because investors are still looking for the same yield profile in place, Fisher said. Because performance has gone up, they’re re-evaluating.
“Yield is up, is that sustainable going forward?” he asked. “Which I don’t think is different than underwriting at any other time during the cycle, but I don’t think cap rates have necessarily compressed but for luxury.”
Distress is an entry point for deals and always has been, said Mike Ross, U.S. consumer markets deal leader at PwC. However, the hoped-for wave of distressed deals is still unlikely to materialize.
There are opportunistic investors out there evaluating the market to find their preferred deal types, he said. They believe in the long-term durability of some unique assets, and many of those marquee deals have made big headlines this year.
It’s more economic to buy than build, he said. Buyers know they can acquire a hotel and reposition it faster and at a better price point than pursuing a new development project.
“I can reposition them in a way that aligns with these consumer trends,” he said. “I can reposition for luxury. I can reposition for experience.”
Any distress that exists in the hospitality sector is for the most part not driven by operational distress, Lesser said. Instead, it is capital structure distress, such as a mortgage coming due and interest rates being higher now than when the debt originated. These owners likely also need to inject fresh capital into the property.
These factors will force sponsors who may not want to sell to sell, he said. However, there’s a lot of capital in search of properties that have a good story going forward.
“Those assets that have good stories going forward, eventually they're going to get bid up in terms of pricing,” he said.. “So, it may be a distressed-induced transaction — doesn't mean it's going to sell at distressed pricing.”
2026 outlook
Lesser said he wouldn’t be surprised if the total number of deals and total dollar volume for this year exceeds 2025.
“Irrespective of the fact that the numbers show that [the second quarter] is lagging [the first quarter], the back of the year I think is going to rock and roll,” he said.
One of the biggest drivers for deals this year will be that many owners are getting to the point where they have to sell, he said. Fund-life requirements, debt maturities, higher refinancing costs, capital investment needs — all of these factors mean they don’t have much of a choice.
On the other side, there’s an enormous amount of capital around the world chasing yield in U.S. commercial real estate, he said.
“Then you drill down further, and hotels are perceived as extremely desirable assets today,” he said.
In his 45 years in the hotel industry, Lesser said he’s never seen a time before when hotels were seen as more desirable than offices, which were considered a steady investment.
“[Hotels are] a significant investment class that investors have come to realize you’ve got to know what you’re doing, but if you do, you can generate superior risk-adjusted returns with hotels as opposed to other potential investments,” he said.
Ross said there are two things he’s keeping an eye on this year. The first is whether the existing investments geared toward luxury are leading to things like pricing power. The RevPAR metrics will tell a story here that seems positive in 2026 compared to 2025.
The second thing is it’s hard to say that investment in luxury is an indefinite trend, he said. Nothing is indefinite, so there may be adjustments to the definition of luxury.
“Think approachable luxury,” he said. “How are investors and operators adapting to this notion here that it can’t all be high-end, especially as we see renewed interest across the generations in different types of experiences?”
If that definition expands, it will be interesting to see how that plays out with investments, not just in assets but in experiences and partnerships to reach that broader demographic, he said.
Oyo parent Prism adds 40 hotels in UK ahead of IPO
New joiners will be a mix of heritage locations and big-box properties
Among Prism’s hotels in the United Kingdom is the 186-room Bristol Grand Hotel by Sunday. (CoStar)
https://www.costar.com/article/160727218/oyo-parent-prism-adds-40-hotels-in-uk-ahead-of-ipo?
Prism, the parent company of India's Oyo Rooms, a global hotel brand, is growing its hotel portfolio in the United Kingdom as it plans to go public.
Prism is adding 40 hotels in the U.K. under its Belvilla and Sunday Hotels brands. The two brands are in Prism’s “premium hospitality” portfolio, its latest move being a concerted effort to expand its segmentation in key markets, the Economic Times of India reports. The hotels will be managed, not franchised, as is the case with the Oyo portfolio.
Sunday Hotels currently has 16 hotels in England and Wales, all of which it opened over the last two years or so in cities such as London, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Manchester and Winchester. Belvilla is a vacation apartment brand, but it is expanding into lifestyle hotels.
Prism said that it will focus on expanding the two brands across Europe as well as across the U.S. and Middle East.
According to peer Indian newspaper Business Standard, the new hotels are a combination of bigger-box hotels and heritage properties.
Puneet Yadav, Prism’s country head for the U.K., said the “expansion is closely aligned with the India-U.K. bilateral tourism corridor.”
That U.K.-India agreement has several pillars, including increased airline flight capacities and cross-border hospitality investments.
Ahead of an initial public offering expected later this year, conglomerate Prism, which owns among other entities, Oyo, has added 40 hotels in the United Kingdom under its Belvilla and Sunday Hotels brands.
Prism's initial public offering is expected later this year. Since September 2025, Prism has been the new name of Oyo’s former owner Oravel Stays.
The number of IPOs in India’s hotel industry has grown over the last few years. Prism filed for its IPO in late 2025 and received approval from the Securities & Exchange Board of India in June.
According to The Hindu, Prism’s IPO has a fundraising target of 66.5 billion Indian rupees ($693 million), which would give the overall company a value of between $7 billion and $8 billion.
In the company's former life as Oravel Stays, it filed for an IPO in 2023, but the launch was abandoned.
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