Beds, Assets & Balance Sheets: The Hotel Industry's Journey Through Change

After half a century in hospitality, one truth endures: this industry doesn’t stand still. It evolves. Slowly at times, all at once at others. What was once a business built on bricks, beds, and brand loyalty is now a high-stakes game of capital flows, margin compression, and digital transformation. The fundamentals remain: service, trust, and consistency. But everything around them is shifting. If the last decade taught us how to survive disruption, the next one will ask us to lead through it. That begins by rethinking what hotels are, who they serve, and how every square foot and every line of code can drive performance.

Sixty years of combined experience in this business teaches one a few things: how to survive, how to adapt, and most importantly, how to lead through change. The hotel business is not just about rooms and revenues; it is about people, performance, and perseverance. We have weathered oil shocks, terrorist attacks, global recessions, and most recently, a pandemic that nearly brought global travel to its knees. Yet we stand here today to be transformed, tested, and more dynamic than ever.

Traditionally, the leading hotel brands were companies that truly embodied the hospitality business – they built, owned, and operated their hotel assets. The big brands were as much real estate companies as they were hospitality brands. To these companies, real estate was a steady, predictable, and safe business, with modest upside potential. After all, how many other investments could you make that would yield 7-10% with a risk of loss that was next to zero?

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The Hotel Yearbook 2025 - Technology Edition

The HOTEL Yearbook Technology 2025 delves into the transformative power of data in the hospitality industry, exploring how the "everything-data decade" is reshaping the landscape. This year's edition brings together perspectives from global hotel brands, technology providers, consultants, and academics to answer a critical question: How can hotels harness technology to drive real, sustainable success?
www.hotelyearbook.com/edition/technology-2025.html