I watched a GM lose his mind over a pool towel inventory about fifteen years ago. Not the cost of the towels (though that was part of it). The issue was that his pool was packed on a Saturday afternoon, his housekeeping team was running towels back and forth like a bucket brigade, and half the people out there weren't even guests. They were locals who'd wandered in through a side gate. He had all the demand in the world and zero way to monetize it. He was giving away capacity for free and paying the labor cost to service it.

That memory is why this Long Island day pass story hit me differently than it'll hit most people. Newsday just profiled a handful of properties out there... Gurney's charging $150-$160 for spa day access, Hotel Indigo East End starting at $50 for pool time, Canoe Place selling daybeds at $500 with a $150 F&B minimum. Those numbers are real. And the platform driving most of this, ResortPass, now has over 2,000 hotel partners and just inked a multiyear deal with Marriott. This isn't a novelty. This is a revenue line that didn't exist five years ago for most properties, and it's growing fast enough that the big brands are building infrastructure around it.

Here's what I think people are missing, though. The upside is obvious... you're selling access to amenities during hours when they'd otherwise sit idle. The industry stat floating around is that day pass users spend two to three times more on property than overnighters. Think about that. Your pool bar, your spa retail, your restaurant covers... all incremental. A well-run day pass program at a resort-style property can generate north of $2M annually in ancillary revenue. That's real money. That changes your P&L. But the downside is the thing nobody wants to talk about in the press release. You are fundamentally changing who is on your property, when, and why. Your overnight guest paying $400 a night expects a certain experience at the pool. When that pool is now shared with 30 day pass holders who paid $50 each, you've got a math problem and a service problem happening simultaneously. The math works beautifully on a Tuesday in May. It gets dicey on a Saturday in July when your paying guests can't find a lounge chair.

The operational complexity here is where most properties stumble. Your PMS wasn't built to manage day guests. Your front desk team is checking in overnighters. Who handles the day pass arrival... the pool attendant you don't have? The hostess who's also running the restaurant? Towel distribution, F&B ordering, incident management, parking... every one of these is a workflow that needs to be designed, staffed, and managed. I've seen hotels try to bolt this onto existing operations without adding a single labor hour and wonder why their TripAdvisor scores dropped in the same quarter their ancillary revenue went up. You traded one problem for another. That's not strategy. That's whack-a-mole. The hotels doing this well... and some are doing it very well... treat day pass operations as a separate business unit with its own staffing model, its own P&L tracking, and clear physical boundaries between day guest spaces and overnight guest spaces. The ones doing it poorly are just selling pool access on an app and hoping it works out.

One more thing. The Marriott-ResortPass deal tells you where this is headed. The brands are going to start expecting this revenue line. If you're a franchisee at a full-service or resort property with pool and spa amenities, don't be surprised when day pass revenue shows up as a "recommended program" in your next brand review. And recommended today has a way of becoming required next year. If you're going to do this (and for many properties, you should), get ahead of it. Design it yourself. Control the guest experience on both sides of the equation. Because if you wait for the brand to hand you a turnkey program with a platform fee attached, you'll be paying someone else to sell access to your own pool.

Let me tell you what "simple holiday planning" actually means when you translate it from brand-speak into property-level reality. It means Hilton has decided that resorts, luxury, lifestyle, and all-inclusive are where the growth story lives... and they're not wrong about that. The luxury and lifestyle portfolio crossed 1,000 hotels last year with nearly 500 more in the pipeline. All-inclusive is at 15 properties and climbing. The development machine is running full speed. But "simple for the guest" and "simple for the owner" are two completely different sentences, and only one of them shows up in the press release.

Here's what caught my eye. Hilton's 2026 guidance projects systemwide comparable RevPAR growth of 1% to 2%. That's fine. That's respectable. But when you're asking owners to deliver "restorative me time" and "meaningful connections" and "immersive journeys"... those aren't 1-2% RevPAR promises. Those are premium experience promises, and premium experiences require premium staffing, premium training, premium physical product, and premium operating costs. So the brand is writing checks with its marketing department that the owner's P&L has to cash. I've read hundreds of FDDs. The variance between projected and actual loyalty contribution should be criminal, and it's the same pattern every cycle... the sales team projects optimistically (they always do), development approves it without stress-testing the downside (they always do), and nobody in the chain has to sit across the table from the owner when the numbers don't work.

I sat in a brand review once where the presenter used the phrase "elegant, purposeful, and truly unforgettable" three times in ten minutes. An owner in the back row leaned over to me and whispered, "My guests would settle for consistent hot water and a front desk agent who speaks the language." He wasn't being cynical. He was being operational. And that's the gap that kills brand concepts... the distance between the rendering and the Tuesday night reality. Hilton's projecting $4 billion in adjusted EBITDA for 2026 and 6-7% net unit growth. That's the machine working beautifully at the corporate level. But the Deliverable Test isn't about corporate. It's about whether a 200-key all-inclusive conversion in a secondary resort market can execute "curated dining experiences" when they can't fully staff the breakfast buffet by 7 AM. (Spoiler: I've watched three flags try this exact repositioning in similar markets. Same champagne at the launch event. Same staffing crisis six months later.)

The asset-light model is doing exactly what it's designed to do for Hilton... generating fee income while transferring real estate risk to owners. That $3.5 billion stock buyback authorization tells you everything about where the cash is flowing. And look, I'm not anti-Hilton here. Their loyalty engine is genuinely powerful. Their distribution is among the best in the industry. When the brand delivers on its promise, it delivers real value. But "when" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The all-inclusive segment in particular requires a level of operational integration that most management companies haven't built the muscle for yet. You're not just managing rooms... you're managing food cost, beverage cost, entertainment programming, activity scheduling, and guest expectations that are fundamentally different from a select-service traveler who just wants a clean room and fast WiFi. That's a different operating model, not just a different brand standard.

If you're an owner being pitched a Hilton resort or all-inclusive conversion right now, here's what I need you to do before you sign anything. Pull the actual performance data from comparable properties in the portfolio... not the projections, the actuals. Calculate your total brand cost as a percentage of revenue (franchise fees plus PIP capital plus loyalty assessments plus reservation fees plus mandated vendor costs plus marketing contributions). If that number exceeds 18% and the projected revenue premium doesn't clear it with room to spare, you're subsidizing the brand's growth story with your capital. The filing cabinet doesn't lie. And neither does this... potential is not a strategy. It never has been.