by Robert Rauch | Aug 25, 2026 | Featured, Forecasts
US hotel RevPAR is pacing toward 5% growth in 2026. I don’t see a reason it can’t hit 4% in 2027, split roughly between 1% occupancy growth and 3% average rate growth. That puts me ahead of where most of the big forecasters sit right now, so let me walk...
by Robert Rauch | Aug 25, 2026 | Featured, Hotel Development, Hotel Management, Hotel Operations
Published on CoStar.com 8/11/2026 I think of a hotel business plan the way an architect thinks about a blueprint. You do not throw a stack of LEGO blocks together and hope they hold up. A written plan is still the best communication tool a hotel has for employees,...
by Robert Rauch | Aug 21, 2026 | Featured, Hotel Management, Hotel Sales
Group business is climbing back toward its pre-pandemic share of hotel demand, and fall is when most group sales teams do their heaviest booking of the year. In my experience, a strong hotel group sales strategy in 2026 has less to do with team size and more to do...
by Robert Rauch | Aug 17, 2026 | Featured, Hotel Management, Hotel Operations
A few months ago I was walking a property at 7:45 on a Saturday morning and found exactly one person at the front desk, no one in the breakfast area, and a housekeeping supervisor trying to cover a callout on the fourth floor herself before a 200-room sellout weekend....
by Robert Rauch | Aug 7, 2026 | Featured, Hotel Management, Hotel Operations
If you own or invest in a hotel, you’ve probably seen the term “hotel fair market share” in your STR report and skimmed past it on the way to RevPAR. That’s a mistake. Fair market share is one of the few numbers in hotel performance reporting that tells...