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...
by Guest Contributor | Jul 22, 2026 | Hotel Development, Industry Insights
Two Coastal Corridors, One Border… and One Shared Opportunity Authored by Luis Bustamante – Bustamante Business Center CEO What happened between two coastal regions separated only by an international border — yet shaped by dramatically different tourism...
by Rick Skinker, Robert Rauch | Jul 22, 2026 | Hotel Operations
By Rick Skinker and Robert Rauch For years, hotels have invested heavily in revenue management systems, labor optimization, guest messaging platforms, and AI-driven pricing tools. Yet one of the most overlooked opportunities to improve profitability isn’t found...
by Robert Rauch | Jul 22, 2026 | Featured, Forecasts, San Diego
San Diego RevPAR is tracking toward something close to 5 percent growth for full-year 2026. That’s up from the 2 to 3 percent I forecasted back in January, and the first half of the year’s data is why I’m revising it. The numbers at a glance, January...
by Robert Rauch | Jul 21, 2026 | Featured, Hotel Operations, Technology
The biggest shift I have seen in what hotel guests want in 2026 is how little patience they have when something does not work the way they expect it to. Coming out of the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, the bar was low, and everyone understood why. Staff were thin....
by Robert Rauch | Jul 20, 2026 | Featured, Hotel Management, Hotel Operations
The question I get most from ownership groups is not whether to renovate. It is whether this is the year to do it, or whether it makes more sense to hold off another year or two. Maximizing hotel renovation ROI depends on making that decision at the right time, with a...