I hired a banquet captain once who had this thing he did. Every wedding reception, about 20 minutes before the cake cutting, he'd walk the perimeter of the room. Not checking on service. Not looking at table settings. He was reading the energy. He could tell you which table was having the best time, which uncle was about to get too loud, and exactly when to dim the lights for the first dance so the moment landed perfectly. He'd been doing banquets for 22 years. Never managed a P&L in his life. Never sat in a brand review. Never used the word "stakeholder." But that man was a hotelier in every way that matters... because he understood that his job wasn't serving food. His job was making sure a bride remembered the best night of her life.

Elizabeth Mullins, president of Evermore Hotels, posted something this week that hit a nerve. She drew a line... a clear, unapologetic line... between asset managers who use the language of hospitality and operators who've actually lived it. "You don't become a hotelier because you sit close to the business," she wrote. "You become one because you've carried it." And she's right. But I want to take it further, because the problem isn't just people borrowing a title. The problem is an industry that has structurally incentivized everyone in the chain to care about everything except the thing that actually matters... the guest's experience.

Look at how the money flows. REITs own the buildings (roughly $72 billion in enterprise value across publicly traded hotel REITs), and they're legally structured to be passive investors focused on real estate returns. They have to distribute 90% of taxable income as dividends. Their job is asset value. Period. Third-party management companies run the operations, collecting base fees of 2-6% of revenue whether the guest had a magical stay or a forgettable one. Their real incentive? Don't lose the account. Brands collect franchise fees, loyalty assessments, reservation charges, marketing contributions... often north of 15-20% of a property's total revenue... and their primary concern is system-wide consistency and net unit growth, because that's what Wall Street rewards. So who in that chain wakes up in the morning thinking about whether the bride remembers her wedding? Who's thinking about the blues club in the basement, or the comedian at the front desk, or the moment a guest walks in and feels something they didn't expect? Nobody's comp plan is built around that. And that's how you lose the plot.

I got a message this week from a young banquet manager at a luxury property in Nashville. She asked me what was the greatest catalyst for my success in hospitality. And I sat with that question for a while, because the honest answer isn't a strategy or a mentor or a lucky break. It's that I fell in love with one specific thing early in my career... making memories. Not the corporate version of "creating memorable experiences" that shows up in brand decks. The real thing. The actual work of building something a guest carries with them for years. When I opened my restaurant, every server was a student at Second City. Three years later, I put a blues club in the basement. In Las Vegas, I brought property-specific entertainment out onto the street. Everything I did was in service of that one idea... give people something they can't get anywhere else, something they'll talk about at dinner next week, something worth more than 5,000 loyalty points or a 15% discount on their next stay. That was my fuel. And I'd tell that young manager the same thing... find the one thing about this business that lights you up, and let it drive everything else. Because the systems around you are not going to do it for you. The REIT doesn't care about your passion. The management company cares about your labor percentage. The brand cares about your compliance score. Your passion is yours to protect.

Here's what worries me. When over 60% of room nights at the major brands are booked through loyalty programs, and when brand proliferation means there are now so many flags that the average traveler can't tell the difference between three of them from the same parent company... the industry has made a bet. The bet is that consistency and points are more valuable than surprise and delight. That standardization beats soul. And for a while, the math supports it. Loyalty contribution drives bookings, bookings drive RevPAR, RevPAR drives asset value, asset value drives REIT returns. Everybody gets paid. But somewhere in that chain, the guest stopped being a person having an experience and became a metric in a contribution report. And the people who actually know how to make a hotel feel alive... the banquet captain reading the room, the GM who walks the property at 6 AM because she can feel when something's off before the data shows it, the night auditor who remembers every regular's name... those people are being managed by systems designed by people who've never done what they do. Mullins is right. The title "hotelier" isn't something you assign yourself. It's something the work gives back to you. And right now, the work is being defined by people who've never done it.

Here's a number that should make every GM in the country stop and think: women make 82% of all travel decisions. Not 82% of leisure decisions. Not 82% of family trip decisions. 82% of ALL travel decisions, including who books the room, which brand gets the loyalty, and whether that property gets a repeat visit or a one-star review. That's not a trend piece. That's your revenue base.

IHG put out some statements last week through their Holiday Inn Express marketing team about women shaping hospitality as consumers and emerging leaders. And look... I'm glad someone at a major brand is saying it out loud. But I've been in this business 40 years, and I can tell you the gap between a brand saying "women are important to our strategy" and a property actually changing how it operates is roughly the same distance as the gap between a brand's PowerPoint and a Tuesday night at a 180-key select-service with three people on staff. Women make up 52% of the hospitality workforce. They hold 30% of leadership roles. Seven percent of CEOs. Those numbers tell you everything you need to know about how seriously the industry has taken this up to now.

I knew an area director once... sharp operator, 20 years in the business, ran some of the best-performing properties in her region. She told me something I never forgot: "The brands survey guests and segment them into personas. I just watch the lobby for 30 minutes. Women traveling alone check the locks, check the lighting in the parking lot, and check whether the front desk agent makes eye contact or stares at a screen. That's your brand experience right there. No persona deck required." She was right. And the fact that she was an area director instead of a divisional VP had nothing to do with her ability and everything to do with the same broken system my industry has been running since I started.

IHG committed $30 million over five years to their LIFT program, which is supposed to support underrepresented groups in hotel ownership, including women. Thirty million sounds like a big number until you realize IHG has over 6,000 hotels globally. That's roughly $5,000 per property spread across five years. A thousand bucks a year per hotel. I spend more than that on lobby coffee. The real investment isn't a corporate program with an acronym. It's the decisions happening every day at property level... who gets promoted to AGM, who gets sent to the revenue management training, who gets tapped for the GM pipeline. That's where careers are built or buried, and no $30 million fund changes that unless the people making those decisions actually change how they think.

Here's what frustrates me. The $73 billion in annual U.S. travel spending by women isn't new money. It's money that's BEEN flowing through our properties while we designed lobbies, amenities, lighting, parking lot layouts, fitness centers, and service protocols primarily through a lens that didn't prioritize the person making the booking decision. The women-over-50 travel market alone is $214 billion, projected to hit $519 billion by 2035. That's not an emerging segment. That's THE segment. And if your property still has a dimly lit hallway between the elevator and the parking garage, and your fitness center has three broken treadmills and no lock on the door, and your front desk team hasn't been trained on the difference between being friendly and being attentive... you're leaving money on the table. Not because a brand told you to care about women travelers. Because 82% of booking decisions are being made by someone who notices things you stopped seeing years ago.

Let me tell you what this story actually is. It's not a press release about a managing director appointment. It's a 168-room luxury hotel in Palm Springs that took over a decade to open, went through bankruptcy, changed brands mid-construction from Andaz to Thompson, and is now on its... what, third act? Fourth? And they just brought in the guy whose last Thompson opening was the fastest ramp in brand history. That's not a routine hire. That's a signal.

Ted Knighton's resume reads like someone Hyatt specifically grooms for properties that need a steady hand after turbulent development. He opened Thompson Houston, which ramped faster than any Thompson in the portfolio and won Hotel of the Year for Hyatt Americas. Before that, he was involved in the Thompson San Antonio opening. Before that, Thompson Seattle. The pattern is clear. Hyatt sends this guy to light the fuse on new Thompson properties. The fact that they're sending him to Palm Springs now, a year and a half after opening, tells you something about where this property is relative to where it should be.

Here's what nobody's talking about. Ten days ago... literally March 3rd... Thompson San Antonio went to foreclosure auction. Lender took it for $40.5 million on a $44 million loan. That's a property Knighton helped open. A property that couldn't make its debt service because of downtown competition, interest rates, and bookings that never hit projections. Now think about Thompson Palm Springs. $350-plus nightly rate. A $49 destination fee on top of that (which, by the way, your guests notice and your reviews reflect). A development that burned through years of delays, contractor disputes, and a bankruptcy filing before it ever welcomed a single guest. The capital stack underneath this thing has to be enormous. And the question every owner, every asset manager, every operator should be asking is: does the revenue justify what it cost to get here?

I sat across from an owner once, years ago, who'd just finished a renovation that went 40% over budget and 14 months past deadline. Beautiful property. Genuinely stunning. He looked at me and said, "The building is perfect. The debt service is going to kill us." He wasn't being dramatic. He was doing math. That's the tension with luxury openings that have troubled development histories. The physical product can be extraordinary (two pools, a HALL Napa Valley tasting room, an adults-only tower with 42 keys and dedicated programming) and the financial structure underneath it can still be fragile. The building doesn't know what it cost. The P&L does.

Palm Springs is a strong leisure market. Hyatt's luxury segment posted 9% leisure transient RevPAR growth in Q4 2025. Knighton is as qualified as anyone in the Thompson system to run this property. But qualification and viability aren't the same thing. If you're an owner watching the Thompson brand right now, you're seeing one property go to foreclosure in San Antonio and another bringing in the A-team 18 months post-opening in Palm Springs. That's not a brand in crisis. But it's a brand where individual property economics matter more than the flag on the building. And that's always been true in luxury. The brand gets you consideration. Execution and capital structure determine whether you survive.