Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

Lodging Leads Real Estate as Hotel Deals Thaw - The Travel & Leisure Podcast Brief - Week of July 25, 2026

The Travel & Leisure Podcast Brief for the week of July 25, 2026. Lodging is the top-performing REIT sector of the year, hotel deal-makers say the three-year freeze is thawing, Hyatt's all-inclusive platform keeps compounding, and luxury travel keeps pulling demand toward the top end.

The Travel & Leisure Podcast Brief

Week of July 25, 2026: Lodging Leads Real Estate as Hotel Deals Thaw

Hotels are having a moment: lodging is the top-performing REIT sector of 2026, deal-makers say the freeze is thawing, and the luxury traveler keeps spending.

Week of July 25, 2026, everything below comes from travel, airlines, lodging and leisure podcasts published over the past week.

If you listened to nothing else this week, the one number to hold onto is this: hotels are, quietly, the best real-estate trade of the year. That is not a hunch. It came straight from the research shop that tracks the entire listed property market. And it lines up almost perfectly with what hotel owners and destination marketers were saying on their own podcasts: after three brutal years, the mood in lodging has flipped from grim to genuinely excited.

Here is what the podcasts covered this week, and why it matters.

The big signal: lodging is the No. 1 REIT sector this year

The clearest data point of the week came from Edward Pierzak, Senior Vice President of Research at Nareit (the trade body for real estate investment trusts, or REITs, companies that own income-producing property and trade like stocks), speaking with host Michael Bull on America's Commercial Real Estate Show (July 21).

To set the scale: Pierzak noted that REITs own about $4.5 trillion in assets across the US, and that 170 million Americans live in households that own them. So when he says one property type is leading, it is a broad read on where money is flowing.

His ranking for 2026:

"We see data centers continues to be one of the top performers, but the top performer this year has been lodging and resorts, and that's really been pushed by very strong demand, both for leisure and business-related travel."

That is a striking reversal. Pierzak reminded listeners that in 2025 the leaders were healthcare REITs, driven by senior housing, while data centers were actually the weakest performer last year, even during the AI-fueled tech rally. Smart, REIT-focused money treated that weakness as a buying opportunity and "loaded up," and data centers snapped back to the top of the table in 2026. But it is hotels, not chips or warehouses, sitting in first place this year.

He also pushed back on the "office is dead" headline. Office REITs are running middle-of-the-pack in 2026, and the story is bifurcated: newer, well-located, well-amenitized buildings (the kind REITs tend to own) are doing fine, while older stock drags the averages down. Notably, active REIT managers are actually overweight office, the only one of the four traditional property types they favor.

The health check underneath the stocks is solid, too: strong funds from operations (FFO, the cash-flow measure investors use for REITs instead of earnings), healthy same-store net operating income, excellent occupancy, and disciplined balance sheets built on low-leverage, long-dated, fixed-rate debt. Pierzak's forecast: the momentum runs through the rest of 2026 "and then even beyond."

Two macro wrinkles worth remembering from his comments: REIT performance beat the broad stock market through the shocks of both years, the tariff policy scare of 2025 and the Iran conflict of 2026, but the tariff episode did meaningfully derail returns in 2025 before they recovered.

On the ground: hotel deal-makers say the freeze is thawing

If the REIT data is the "what," the best "why now" of the week came from Vamsi Bonthala, co-founder of Arbor Lodging, a hotel owner-operator, on the Teague Talks Podcast (July 17). This was a candid, operator's-eye view of a market waking up.

Bonthala's timeline: the hotel business had been "sliding since June of 2022" through three tough years. Then, around January 2026, "things are changing. I can feel it."

The forecasting story he told is a great tell. Coming into the year, the industry data firm STR (now part of CoStar) and much of Wall Street had penciled in a roughly flat, zero-growth year for hotels. That was even in Arbor's own budget. The more optimistic independent hoteliers were calling for about 5% growth. Reality landed in between and, crucially, better than the pessimists feared: after a strong first half, STR upgraded its forecast to around 3%, and Bonthala said first-quarter operations came in "really good."

Why deals stalled, and why they are restarting, comes down to three things lining up at once: debt, equity, and sellers' price expectations. On his read, debt has been available for a while (just not cheap), and now the equity money is finally coming back to the table:

"For the first time, like we're actively engaged on like three or four deals that we're genuinely excited about. And more importantly, equity seems to be picking up the phone and chatting about it."

He captured the pricing standoff that had frozen transactions with a line every real-estate person will recognize (a "cap rate" is roughly the yield a property throws off, a higher cap rate means a cheaper price):

"No one ever wants to sell at a nine cap... Everyone wants to sell at a six cap. But no one wants to buy at a six cap."

Deals get unstuck, he explained, when buyers can believe in growth again, "I'll buy a seven cap because I'm going to grow it into a 10." That belief is back. He said Arbor's pipeline and closings are both up "significantly," and that the industry's big NYU hospitality conference, "depressing" for three straight years, finally "felt different" this year.

A vivid example of how long recoveries can take: Bonthala said the San Francisco Bay Area, Arbor's last market to turn, has been "on fire this year," but it took six years to come back, long after most investors had written it off.

Two strategy notes from the same conversation that hint at where a nimble hotel investor is leaning right now:

  • Arbor built a credit arm. Rather than only buying hotels, the firm now lends on them, originating preferred equity, mezzanine and senior loans, including its first programmatic partnership with a large global credit fund. The logic: when equity deals are scarce, "paper" (loans) pays well, and the same team that underwrites hotel equity can underwrite the debt. During the last financial crisis, Arbor did north of 25 loans, so this is a return to form, not a new adventure.
  • Arbor is expanding into Mexico. What started as a back-office hunt for talent post-COVID became a ~20-person operation in Mexico City, accounting, HR, sales, operations, revenue management, that Bonthala calls a full-fledged Latin American management company. It works the same time zone as Chicago for half the year. The firm is now chasing third-party hotel management deals in resort markets and luxury/lifestyle boutique hotels, a market where he says institutional operators with "boots on the ground" are almost nonexistent, "there might only be one other company."

The all-inclusive boom: how Hyatt built the world's largest platform

The most concrete growth story of the week came from Anna Tomachevich, Global Vice President of Brand and Marketing for Hyatt's Inclusive Collection, interviewed by James Schillinglaw on The Insider Travel Report Podcast (July 23) at the Travel + Leisure World's Best conference.

All-inclusive resorts, where one price covers your room, food, and drinks, used to be a niche, sun-and-sand product. Hyatt has turned it into a flagship. The numbers Tomachevich gave:

  • Hyatt now runs 11 all-inclusive brands and calls itself the largest all-inclusive platform in the world.
  • The Inclusive Collection has grown 60 times since Hyatt started the journey in 2013, kicked off by the acquisition of Apple Leisure Group (ALGV) and its AM Resorts brands, then expanded with brands Hyatt built itself.
  • The resorts have enrolled more than 4.3 million new World of Hyatt loyalty members over the past five years, which she framed as a "portal" that pulls guests into the rest of Hyatt's hotels.
  • 80% of the portfolio is upper-upscale and luxury, not the budget image many people still carry.

Her explanation for why the category exploded is a useful piece of consumer history: all-inclusive "became way more popular after COVID," partly because, in the early days, Mexico and the Caribbean were among the only places Americans could actually go. People tried it, liked it, and stuck with it, and Tomachevich stressed the category is "very profitable... very adaptable" and "resilient."

The genuinely new development is all-inclusive moving upmarket into true luxury. Hyatt is converting some existing luxury hotels and launching its first Park Hyatt all-inclusive alongside Grand Hyatt properties:

"The luxury traveler is also interested in an all-inclusive elevated experience... because it's all about removing friction and not having to sign a check and having everything taken care of."

On geography, she was refreshingly blunt about the US: don't expect many all-inclusives here, because "it's just not scalable... because of cost." The growth is going overseas instead. The portfolio is concentrated in Spain (where the format actually originated) and expanding into Portugal, Bulgaria and Greece, with the Middle East and North Africa flagged as the next frontier, over 4,000 rooms already signed. The newest brand, Hyatt Vivid, aimed at a "younger mindset," opens its next property in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, this year.

The luxury traveler keeps winning, and the "K-shaped" split is real

A recurring theme across the week's podcasts was that the money in travel is flowing toward the top end. The sharpest articulation came from Jackie Gifford, Editor-in-Chief of Travel + Leisure, recapping her magazine's third annual World's Best Summit on The Insider Travel Report Podcast (July 21). (The summit sold out this year and last.)

Gifford's takeaway on the consumer, the "K-shaped" economy, where high earners pull away while others tread water:

"The rich keep getting richer... luxury travel is on the ascent, the K-shaped economy... They're going farther. They're going faster. They're doing more. They're booking suites. Taking private planes."

She noted the amount of private-jet travel has grown, and that an interesting "semi-private" tier is emerging between first class and full private aviation. Her explanation ties back to the pandemic: coming out of COVID, affluent travelers decided they could no longer wait to do the trips they had always wanted, and that urgency simply never faded for the top cohort.

The other big theme from the summit, featuring an interview with media mogul and summit chairman Barry Diller, was artificial intelligence in travel. The consensus Gifford relayed: AI is a genuinely useful tool for personalizing and speeding up parts of a trip, and for crunching data, but "the surprise and delight factor, which is what travel does so well, that is fundamentally human." Diller's framing, as she recounted it, was that no one knows exactly where AI goes, "but what we do know is there's a level of taste and trust and the idea of having a real human experience [that] no one can ever disrupt."

Vegas turned live events into a year-round revenue machine

For a masterclass in how a destination actually engineers demand, look to Kate Wik, Chief Marketing Officer of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (and a former MGM Resorts marketing executive), on the Building Better CMOs and Marketing Leaders podcast (July 22).

The scale of Las Vegas is worth stating plainly. Wik said the city has about 150,000 hotel rooms, the most of any US city, and finished 2025 at roughly 80% occupancy, well above both the US average and the top-25-market average. That is a lot of rooms to keep full, across a spectrum that runs from budget (Circus Circus) to ultra-luxury (Wynn, Bellagio). And, echoing the week's theme, she said the luxury segment is "just killing it" right now.

Her job, she explained, is not just to fill rooms ("room nights") but to drive profitable visitation, guests who also spend on dining, nightclubs, dayclubs, shopping and shows. The catch: the visitors authority doesn't own the transaction the way a single casino does, which makes proving marketing ROI genuinely hard.

The most instructive part was how Vegas uses marquee events to fix its weakest weeks. The standout example:

"[The F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix] took one of our bottom performing weekends on our calendar. And it has now made it one of the top performing weekends."

Wik said the Formula One race, held the weekend before Thanksgiving, carries "the economic impact of hosting a Super Bowl," and Las Vegas just locked it in with a 10-year extension through 2037. On the Super Bowl itself: after hosting its first, the city has already secured another for 2029. She also cited 6 billion paid ad impressions this year (a billion more than last year) and a decades-old, weekly nationwide "brand health" survey that tracks Americans' intent to travel to Vegas. The current ad campaign, "Pack for Vegas," six 15-second spots, deliberately revives the wink-and-a-nod spirit of the old "What Happens Here, Stays Here" slogan.

Her honest admission, that marketers still can't cleanly measure the long-term payoff of brand-building versus one-off events, is a rare bit of candor, and a reminder of how much of tourism demand is manufactured, not just captured.

Also heard

  • AI is quietly rewiring the front desk. On Next Gen in Lodging by CoStar (July 20), Andrew Parrott, SVP of Customer Experience at the UK guest-experience platform Alliants, described using "agentic" AI to automate the drudgery of hotel operations, booking confirmations, service requests, even towel deliveries via WhatsApp and text, so staff can spend their time on the human touch instead. His client roster shows how broad this is going: budget and select-service chains like Premier Inn, easyHotel and Molly's alongside luxury names like Four Seasons, Rosewood and Mandarin Oriental. The platform runs hotels from as small as 56 rooms up to a single property with 3,660 rooms. His flywheel observation is a neat one: budget brands push the technology toward automation, while luxury brands use that same automation to free up staff for higher-touch, personalized service.
  • A note on what wasn't there. This week's travel and leisure podcasts were dominated by hotels, lodging real estate and destination marketing. There was little fresh commentary on the airlines (no named-carrier capacity or fare discussion surfaced), cruise lines, or the big online travel agencies, so nothing to force onto the page. The signal this week is squarely a lodging story.

The bottom line

The through-line across five very different conversations is remarkably consistent. The data says lodging is the strongest corner of listed real estate this year, and the practitioners agree: hotel deal-making is thawing after a three-year freeze, all-inclusive is booming and moving upmarket, luxury and experiences are pulling demand, and destinations like Las Vegas are manufacturing that demand with ever-bigger live events. If there is a caveat, it is the one Bonthala offered himself, "it's a lot easier to look smart being a pessimist," but even the pessimist said he'd "take this all day long."