The Olympics Remind Us: Hotels Exist to Welcome the World

I was standing behind the front desk at the Golden Gate in 2012 — maybe 2013 — when a couple from South Korea walked in during a Fremont Street event we were running. They didn't have a reservation. They barely spoke English. And our front desk agent, a woman named Maria who'd come to Vegas from Guatemala, somehow checked them in, walked them to the elevator, and drew them a little map of the best food within two blocks. On the back she wrote "welcome" in Korean. I don't know when she learned that. I didn't ask.

They came back three more times over the next two years. They asked for Maria by name.

I'm thinking about Maria because CoStar just ran a piece reminding the industry that the Olympics — and international events like them — are good for hotels. That being part of the world, welcoming travelers from everywhere, is a good thing for business.

And my first reaction was: we need a reminder?

Here's what nobody's saying. The debate about international tourism has gotten so wrapped up in policy, visa processing times, brand-safety narratives, and macroeconomic modeling that we've forgotten the most basic truth in this business. Hotels exist to take care of strangers. That's the whole job. A person shows up far from home, and you make them feel like they belong. The country on their passport doesn't change the mission.

I've run properties with international workforces — in Saipan, I had employees from the Philippines, China, Korea, Bangladesh, Nepal. In Vegas, my teams were from everywhere. At the Westin Cincinnati, half my housekeeping staff had come to this country from somewhere else. And here's the thing — those teams didn't just tolerate international guests. They connected with them. A housekeeper from Haiti who sees a Haitian family checking in doesn't need a training module on cultural sensitivity. She needs you to get out of her way.

The Olympics are a spectacle. They drive airlift, fill rooms, generate rate premiums in host cities and shoulder markets. Fine. Good. But the real value isn't the two-week surge. It's the reminder — to ownership groups, to brands, to the people making decisions about marketing spend and visa advocacy and government relations — that international travel is the backbone of urban hotel performance in every major American market. Not a nice-to-have. The backbone.

When international inbound travel dips, I've watched it hit properties in real time. Gateway city hotels feel it first. Group business takes longer to show the bruise, but it shows. And the operators on the ground — the GMs, the revenue managers, the sales teams — they can't fix visa policy. They can't change exchange rates. They can't undo a news cycle that makes a traveler in Munich or Seoul think twice about booking the U.S.

What they can do is be ready. Be genuinely, operationally ready to welcome whoever walks through that door.

That means multilingual signage that doesn't look like an afterthought. It means training your front desk to handle international credit cards without making the guest feel like a problem. It means breakfast offerings that acknowledge not everyone wants a waffle. It means your concierge knows where the nearest mosque is, or the nearest kosher restaurant, without Googling it in front of the guest.

None of that is expensive. Most of it is free. All of it requires giving a damn.

I think about the properties I've run — from a 122-room casino at the foot of Fremont Street to a 456-room unionized convention hotel in Cincinnati to a dual-brand Marriott across the river from Manhattan right now — and the constant across all of them is this: the best guest experiences I've ever witnessed happened when a team member saw a human being, not a reservation number. When Maria drew that map for the couple from South Korea, she wasn't executing a brand standard. She was being Maria.

The Olympics will come and go. The athletes will fly home. The broadcast rights revenue will get divided up. But the question for this industry is the same question it's always been: when someone from the other side of the world shows up at your door, tired and far from home, what do they feel?

If your answer requires a policy position or a macroeconomic forecast, you've already lost the plot.