Host of the Suite Spot podcast and Vice President of Marketing at Travel Media Group, Ryan Embree, breaks down the key takeaways from the 2025 Hospitality Show that took place in Denver, Colorado, last month. 

Ryan shares not only his opinion on some of the most prevalent topics from the renowned industry event, but he also shares what panelists, attendees, hoteliers, and others had to say about the conference and the state of hospitality. 

Tune in now to listen to the full episode.

Ryan Embree:

Welcome to Suite Spot, where hoteliers check in, and we check out what’s trending in hotel marketing. I’m your host, Ryan Embree. Hello everyone. Ryan Embree here with the Suite Spot Podcast, and we are fresh off of our 2025 Hospitality Show coverage in Denver, Colorado. We are back here in our Travel Media Group headquarters, a little bit closer to C-level in our Suite Spot podcast studio. Absolutely incredible event. Wanna first think Questex and AHLA as well as the city of Denver for hosting from end to end. So amazing from the programming to the networking to the industry professionals that we had the privilege of interviewing. You can find all of those exclusive interviews on our TMG YouTube page, make sure to follow along. But in today’s episode, we are gonna go with our top takeaways from the Hospitality Show in Denver. And it really started right off the bat. I mean, this was an end to end, just jam packed insights, trends, everything a hotelier could want. You know, this was billed as one of the most comprehensive shows in hospitality. And from all of the education sessions that we saw, the panelists, the conversations that we had, the networking that went on again, hats off to the teams over at AHLA and Questex, where I’ll start my key takeaways is really one of the first quotes that really resonated with me as an attendee on the first day. And this was I forget who I can attribute this quote to, but was talking about how we ended the 2024 Hospitality Show in San Antonio. And everything that has happened between then and the start of the 2025 Hospitality show, an election, you know, a tumultuous start to the year, with tariffs, international travel, almost seeing double-digit drops in some places between some countries. And then now we have a government shutdown here. So, so many things that the hospitality industry had to deal with. And, you know, I have the privilege of attending multiple events throughout the year, and never have I ever been on such a rollercoaster ride. It started at the beginning of the year in March where we met a lot of hoteliers that were kind of bracing for impact. They were coming down this hill. Projections didn’t look great. A lot of sentiment out there was not was not awesome. Deals were not getting done. It just feel very like a crawl. And then all of a sudden summer came and as we were kind of bracing ourselves for this just dip or this terrible kind of cliff that we were about to, to fall off, we kind of opened our eyes as an industry and said, it’s really not as bad as it’s being made out to be. And a lot of hoteliers, as we saw and we interviewed, talked to, had some really good summers, had some really good numbers, occupancy, looking across different markets, some of the markets that weren’t doing as well rebounded. And they were starting to see a little bit of glimmer of hope. And now here we are at the end of the year and it feels like those storm clouds are brewing again. And we’re bracing ourselves for a new year in 2026. And maybe it’s because we’re just looking at the numbers. It’s budget season. We’re starting to try to forecast like we love to do and have to do frankly in hospitality, but it just feels like that worry is coming over us again. But to that, I feel like it’s in these times where there’s a lot of creativity and ingenuity that starts to really spur and, and it’s these events that could be a catalyst for real change in our industry. There were a lot of industry leaders up on stage over these last few days at the hospitality show in Denver that presented some pretty interesting ideas when it came to housekeeping, staffing, the booking experience and really challenging the status quo. And it’s these types of events that can really start a conversation and build a foundation and momentum for true change within our industry. We saw that change happen very, very quickly during COVID because it needed to, it was a necessity. But now here we are and we can all feel it. We can feel the belts tightening from the hotel all the way to our guests and consumers. And this is when we need to start looking around and trying to come up some fresh ideas. And, you know, some of those might not even be within hospitality. I mean, one of the keynote speakers was Chris Barton from Shazam, and, you know, trying to get these fresh voices maybe outside of hospitality. Blue Origin was another speaker talking about space tourism, maybe looking for some new channels. You know, space tourism might not be a couple years down the line in your portfolio if you’re a management company right now. But is it a trend that you can capitalize on, right? Are there areas where this could be happening within the next decade? You’re positioning yourself in markets that are going to cater to that demand, which could exponentially increase. It was truly amazing to hear some of the stories that we heard at the hospitality show when it came to space tourism. But all that to say doesn’t necessarily need to be hospitality led for these hospitality innovation to come from. And I feel like it’s during these times, during these events where you’re going to see that we had several different conversations. One with a leader of landing place hotels, the brand leader of landing place hotels who saw an opportunity, to do things a little differently with a brand. And they’re seeing double digit. They already accumulated a double digit pipeline right now in development. It’s very, very interesting. We’re at, we’re at a, a kind of an inflection point in hospitality right now as we enter 2026 and we in into this kind of unknown. But it will be really, really exciting to see what type of innovation comes from this. Because I do think this is when people are gonna start getting creative. ’cause those margins are just too tight right now, right? Between staffing, construction costs. The demand is still there, but the profits are not being seen. And that was, there was no, it was not an error that the Hospitality Show started its programming with multiple sessions on profits and how these management companies, brands can work together and these owners assets can work together in order to see profit margin increase. Because right now it’s just slimmed over these last couple years. And it’s being felt, it’s being felt throughout the industry. You know, it was interesting to see some of the leaders that I spoke to and interview, got the opportunity to interview, talk about capitalizing on some of these trends that we’re seeing right now in hospitality, you know, personalization, multi-generational travel, experiential travel, right? Marriott announced recently it’s outdoor collection and, you know, lifestyle brands, all of this mixed in. And I think what’s happening right now is the traveler, the consumer is feeling that tightening in their belt, but they still want to travel. It was, it has not been taken away from them like it was in 2020, but they certainly have to do some more due diligence. And when they do travel, which they’re going to prioritize, they wanna make sure they make the biggest bang for their buck. So they’re gonna start prioritizing and maybe looking for those hotels that they feel can give them the widest and breadth of experience, right? Rather than just be loyalty to those brands. So those brands are seeing that they’re trying to capitalize on these trends and they’re exploring more into the soft brand lifestyle division. We had heads of man of a couple different management companies talk about, you know, the patterns that they’re seeing in consumer sentiment and what they want out of their experience. They want to feel like they’re having a localized experience. We’ve always talked about that on this podcast about how to try to tell your story, how to make your guest part of the story, part of your local community, how to give them that community first experience. But now guests are clamoring for it. They’re looking for it, they’re doing research, they’re doing research in different places. That was another big trend and takeaway that I heard a lot is hotels management companies. They’re starting to look at how guests are using the booking journey right now. And l and where does LLMs fit into that? They feel like they don’t want to be get left behind in a search, just like I’m sure when Google started to aggregate all these hotels online, they didn’t want to be on page two or page three, right? So how can, when a traveler searches best hotels in this market, or maybe a little bit more specific of a search your hotel be retrieved in those how can your hotel be a part of those results, right? And I think more and more hotels are asking that question. It’ll be really interesting to see where that goes. AI and technology, it feels like it has to be a part of every programming agenda and conversation that we talked about now. But it is starting, I feel like, to settle into two separate camps. One that really wanna prioritize the employee empowerment, right? How can I use AI and technology to empower my employees to do their job efficiently? Something that we’ve preached at Travel Media Group where we have several AI innovations that help the employee get some really deeper insights into its online reputation. But also, you know, there’s that second