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U.S. hotel performance is posting notable gains compared with 2025 levels, as travel continues to be a priority for many despite persistent inflation, the Middle Eastern conflict, and lackluster job growth. While luxury hotels are posting the greatest RevPAR gains, even economy and midscale hotels are showing occupancy improvement and ADR gains. Since January 1, our RevPAR forecast has been notably higher than others in our sector, and performance so far this year suggests that even our forecast may be too conservative. As of late April, despite persistent inflation, the Middle Eastern conflict, and lackluster job growth, occupancy is increasing across all hotel classes nationally. In the trailing-28-day period ending April 18, national RevPAR was up 4.5%, according to STR/CoStar (March RevPAR was up 4.4%). If the first quarter is any indication, we are looking at what may ultimately be a strong year for our industry, all things considered. We did see this coming. Last year had its significant challenges. Great uncertainty took hold with the announcement of the tariffs, disruption occurred in the government sector (and its normally steady demand) with DOGE efforts, and interest rate cuts didn’t occur until the last three Fed meetings of the year. Some cities had “off” convention years or closed their convention centers for reconstruction, the L.A. metro area experienced unprecedented fires, and Houston had a bad comparison year given weather events in 2024. Other factors further diminished the sector’s performance. And while this year’s challenges are not minimal by any means, last year was, quite simply, worse. Our latest U.S. forecast is as follows. It’s a positive sign that funding has resumed for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and security lines have normalized at major U.S. airports. We can certainly hope that oil prices stabilize, inflation wanes, and our government finds that “exit ramp” from the Middle Eastern conflict sooner rather than later. These possibilities, coupled with further potential interest-rate relief, should fuel continued economic growth and occupancy gains. ADRs will be lifted by special events this year, such as the highly anticipated FIFA World Cup . Better convention calendars are also on tap for certain cities, and atypical 2025 conditions in other cities (such as Austin and Houston) should not recur in 2026. The Bay Area continues its strong rebound this year, aided by Super Bowl. Furthermore, if we enter a period of greater economic certainty this year, corporations are expected to bolster hiring efforts and travel budgets. The industry’s overall average cap rate is on the decline, with transactions averaging 8.3% for Q4, similar to the 8.2% average for the year. We expect average cap rates to trend downward in 2026, as we see more turnaround properties with challenged NOI levels being sold. These hotels, which often sell with a cap rate in the low single digits, will bring down the average that is blended with stabilized assets that sell at 8% to 9% cap rates. A normal cap rate in today’s market (for a stabilized or near-stabilized property) remains

Artificial intelligence continues to expand its role across the hiring lifecycle. Resume screening, interview scheduling, job description drafting, and candidate communications now move faster than ever. These tools improve efficiency and reduce administrative burden. They do not replace the recruiter. Hiring remains a human decision rooted in judgment, context, and trust. Technology supports the process. Recruiters determine the outcome. Organizations adopting AI-driven recruiting often expect better results through speed alone. The reality looks different. Faster processing does not guarantee stronger hires. In many cases, it increases risk when human oversight fades. Recruiters remain responsible for interpreting information, assessing nuance, and protecting long-term hiring success. This dynamic becomes even more pronounced in corporate, hospitality, hotel, and travel technology environments. These industries operate on brand perception, service delivery, revenue performance, and client retention. A single hiring mistake at the leadership or revenue-generating level impacts far more than one department. It affects guest experience, investor confidence, and long-term growth. In these sectors, a recruiter functions as a risk manager as much as a talent advisor. The Role of AI in Modern Recruiting AI performs best when managing volume. Applicant tracking systems sort large numbers of resumes quickly. Automated scheduling tools reduce coordination friction. AI-generated content accelerates early drafts of job postings and outreach messages. These improvements free recruiters from repetitive tasks and create space for higher-value work. Problems arise when automation replaces evaluation rather than supporting it. AI operates on patterns, keywords, and predefined criteria. Hiring decisions rarely fit neatly inside those boundaries. According to Harvard Business Review , AI tools in hiring require constant human oversight to avoid bias and misinterpretation of candidate data. Recruiters supply oversight. Without them, efficiency replaces accuracy. In corporate environments, roles often blend strategy, cross-functional leadership, and revenue responsibility. A Chief Revenue Officer in a hotel management company, for example, must align sales, marketing, distribution, and operations. No algorithm evaluates executive presence in a board setting or assesses how a candidate navigates ownership expectations. A recruiter probes these factors through targeted questioning and reference validation. Resume Screening and the Cost of False Rejection Automated screening systems excel at sorting resumes at scale. They struggle with context. Qualified candidates often exit the process early due to missing keywords, formatting issues, or outdated job titles. Transferable skills frequently go unnoticed. Career progression inside a single organization sometimes appears as stagnation rather than growth. False rejection creates hidden costs. Strong candidates never reach a conversation. Hiring managers see thinner shortlists. Diversity suffers. SHRM continues to report that over-automated screening reduces talent pool quality and increases unintended exclusion. Recruiters counter this risk through review and interpretation. They spot experience that does not match rigid criteria but fits the role. They understand industry nuance, branding changes, and non-linear career paths. This intervention protects quality and equity. In hospitality recruiting, this human filter becomes critical. Many high-performing hotel leaders rise through operations rather than formal education pathways. A General Manager who built RevPAR growth over five years at an independent property might not

It was 2017. A luxury hotel sales office. One of the best sales directors I’ve ever worked with was sitting across from me—frustrated, confused, and honestly a bit angry. His numbers were phenomenal. ADR growth: +23% year over year. Corporate accounts: 47 active contracts. Group pipeline: stronger than the previous two years combined. Yet when the Director of Commercial role opened… he wasn’t even considered. Someone from another property got the job. He looked at me and said something I’ve heard hundreds of times in hospitality leadership circles: "I don’t understand. I’m the best performer on the team." And that’s exactly why he didn’t get promoted. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth most high performers in hospitality never hear: If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted. The Hospitality Leadership Myth Nobody Talks About Most professionals in hotel sales, revenue management, and commercial leadership believe promotions follow a simple formula. Perform well. Hit targets. Work harder than everyone else. Promotion follows. Sounds logical. But hospitality organizations don’t promote performance alone . They promote scalability . Think about it from a GM or COO’s perspective. If you’re running the most important corporate accounts personally… If you’re the only one who understands the RFP strategy… If group revenue collapses the moment you take a week off… Promoting you creates risk. Not opportunity. So the company does the rational thing. They keep you exactly where you are. Because you’re too valuable in that seat . And yes—this happens constantly in hotels across the globe. The “Irreplaceable Employee” Trap High performers often think being indispensable is a strength. But in leadership pipelines, it’s often a career bottleneck . Let me explain. If the organization believes three things about you, your promotion chances drop dramatically: 1. The business depends on you personally Not your system. Not your strategy. You. I once met a hotel sales director in Kuala Lumpur who personally handled 83% of the property's corporate revenue . Impressive? Sure. Promotable? Not really. Because removing him would instantly destabilize the revenue engine. And senior leadership knew it. 2. Your knowledge isn’t transferable Another common scenario. The sales director who knows every client relationship… Every negotiation tactic… Every account history going back 12 years. But none of it is documented. None of it is systemized. None of it is transferable to the team. Which means replacing that person would take months—sometimes years . So leadership delays the promotion. Indefinitely. 3. The team can't perform without you Here’s the brutal one. If your team collapses when you step away… You’re not leading. You’re holding the system together manually . And organizations don’t promote people who are acting as the system. They promote people who build the system . Big difference. The Leadership Shift Most Sales Directors Miss At some point in your career, the job changes. Early stage: Your job is to produce revenue . Later stage: Your job is to produce leaders who produce revenue . That shift separates senior managers from executives. And many

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Every year, luxury hotel operators search some version of the same question. "What are the best hotel marketing agencies?" "Which hospitality marketing firm should I hire?" "How do I choose a luxury hotel marketing company?" The search returns the same results. Roundup lists. Agency websites. Comparison articles written by agencies about themselves. A rotating cast of familiar names: technology platforms, creative agencies, email and CRM vendors, presented as equivalent options to evaluate on price, capability, and case study quality. The process feels like due diligence. It is not. The reason this process fails is not always that the wrong agency is selected from the list. It is that the list is answering the wrong question. The question is not which agency. The question is which layer. Hotel Demand Is Not One Thing Before any agency comparison is useful, a more fundamental question must be answered: at which layer of the demand stack does your specific problem live? Hotel demand does not arrive from a single source or at a single moment. It forms across a sequence of distinct stages, each governed by different economic logic and requiring different infrastructure to influence. The demand origin layer is where a traveler first encounters a property in a channel the hotel governs, where identity is captured and a direct relationship can begin before intermediary comparison defines the choice set. This is distinct from awareness. Brand advertising, editorial coverage, social media, and PR can all create familiarity and influence consideration, but they do not constitute demand origin unless they also capture identity and establish repeatable access before the traveler enters OTA comparison, Google Hotel Ads, or advisor-mediated booking flows. Awareness creates familiarity. Demand origin creates governable access. Most upstream marketing does the first. Very few systems consistently do the second. The conversion layer is where a traveler who has already discovered a property decides whether to book directly or through an intermediary. Website optimization, booking engine performance, direct booking incentives, and metasearch campaigns operate here. The retention and activation layer is where existing guest relationships are managed, deepened, and reactivated. CRM systems, loyalty programs, email marketing to past guests, and post-stay communication operate here. The brand and awareness layer is where a property's identity is built and distributed across media environments. Brand strategy, advertising, public relations, and content marketing operate here. This layer feeds consideration and can influence which properties enter a traveler's mental shortlist, but it does not by itself capture identity or establish a direct relationship the hotel controls. These layers are not fully interchangeable. A CRM cannot introduce your property to a traveler who has never heard of it. A booking engine cannot capture identity before OTA comparison begins. Brand awareness can create the conditions for demand origin but does not guarantee it. The Test That Separates Upstream Infrastructure from Upstream Influence One question separates demand origin infrastructure from demand origin influence: If you stopped paying tomorrow, would the relationships remain? Paid media stops. Brand campaigns end. PR cycles close. Influencer

Over the last year, there has been no avoiding the artificial intelligence (AI) conversation—from sweeping promises of enhanced productivity and digital transformation to the anxious contemplation of who (or what) might get left behind. And not just the measured, reasonable kind of concern that accompanies any technological shift, but something closer to existential dread: the idea that AI-fuelled job displacement is coming at a scale beyond what we’d normally accept as the inevitable cost of continued evolution. The hospitality industry certainly isn’t exempt from this discussion. If anything, as an industry with a somewhat notorious reputation for its resistance to new-age technology adoption and chronic staffing challenges, we find ourselves at the forefront of it. It’s increasingly easy to view the rapid adoption of AI as a Trojan Horse for the mass displacement of human staff in an industry built on personal connection. But that anxiety misses the mark. Hospitality doesn't have a staffing problem so much as a structural design problem. If you ask me, the implementation of AI isn't going to displace the workforce—it is going to reveal, and hopefully fix, an operating model that has been broken for years. Reframing the hospitality labour shortage story A March 2026 survey from the American Hotel & Lodging Association reports that more than half of respondents describe their properties as somewhat or severely understaffed. Labour costs remain one of the most-cited financial pressures facing operators, accounting for 30–45% of total hotel operating costs according to HVS (a figure that continues to climb). High turnover compounds the issue, with quits rate in accommodation and food services sitting at 4.8% in January 2026. Many operators are attempting to build stable service delivery on top of a routinely fragmented foundation. This is where I think the conventional narrative fails us. The industry isn’t just understaffed—it’s simultaneously understaffed and overstaffed, because it is structurally misallocated. When core systems don’t share a consistent operational truth, humans become the necessary integration layer. They re-key data from one platform into another, spend half their shift reconciling discrepancies that shouldn’t exist, and chase status updates across systems that should have been talking to each other years ago. Industry research published in 2025 revealed that only 24% of hotels report full integration of core systems across PMS, RMS, POS, booking engines, and distribution platforms. Just 34% manage guest data centrally. The remainder rely on disconnected systems, and 16% still use manual methods. That is not a labour shortage. It could be better described as a “faulty operating model” tax that the industry has been paying for so long it’s forgotten about the tab. Think tasks, not job titles The most useful lens for understanding AI’s impact on hospitality isn’t about which jobs disappear. It’s about which tasks move, and what that does to labour economics. Anthropic’s Economic Index is worth paying attention to here. According to their research, observed AI use leans more toward augmentation than full automation. In their initial analysis, 57% of AI-assisted tasks were augmented (the

[Dallas, 30 April 2026] – Mews , the operating system for hospitality, announced that Llano Real Estate Group has selected Mews to power a growing portfolio of hospitality assets across Texas, including hotels, RV parks and short-term rentals. Llano Real Estate Group is rapidly growing its footprint, with nine properties including Cactus Cove Inn & Suites in Amarillo and multiple RV parks and short-term rentals. As the portfolio expanded, the team needed a more robust and flexible system to manage group bookings, long stays and corporate billing across multiple locations. With Mews, Llano now benefits from centralized multi-property management, allowing teams to oversee all assets from one place. Previously manual processes – such as creating group reservations or managing complex billing arrangements – are now streamlined through automation, significantly reducing administrative workload. “Where we’re going as a business requires a completely different level of operational control,” said Matt Marrs, owner of Cactus Cove Inn & Suites and operator at Llano Real Estate Group. “With Mews, everything is faster, more intuitive and built to scale with us.” Operational improvements are already delivering impact. Group bookings that once required multiple manual steps can now be created in seconds, while corporate billing and invoicing are structured and automated. Beyond efficiency gains, Mews provides the foundation for Llano’s long-term growth strategy. With integrated payments, revenue management and multi-property capabilities, the business is building a modern tech stack designed to support continued expansion. “Llano Real Estate Group is a great example of how ambitious operators are using technology to scale smarter,” said Michael Coscetta, President of Mews. “By unifying their operations and automating complexity, they’ve created the foundation for growth across their entire portfolio.” As Llano continues to expand, Mews will support further innovation across its portfolio, from revenue optimization to advanced operational automation. About Llano Real Estate Group Llano Real Estate Group is a Texas-based real estate and property management company overseeing a growing portfolio of hospitality and residential assets. With properties spanning hotels, RV parks and short-term rentals, the company is focused on building scalable, technology-driven operations that support long-term growth. Backed by decades of experience across development, construction and property management, Llano is committed to delivering high-quality assets and exceptional guest and tenant experiences. Learn more at: https://www.llanorealestategroup.com/