Booking, Delta, Royal Caribbean, and Marriott are all posting massive numbers, and every headline screams recovery. But when you pull the hotel sector apart from the travel sector, the story your P&L is telling looks nothing like the one Wall Street is celebrating.
2025 gave us the first full-year decline in occupancy and RevPAR since the pandemic... but the executives describing it as "uneven" are burying the real story. Some operators thrived. Some got crushed. And the difference wasn't luck.
Industry leaders are projecting confidence while RevPAR growth forecasts sit at half the long-term average and the performance gap between luxury and economy widens into a canyon. The question isn't whether hotels are resilient... it's which hotels.
