The Crisis Crushing America’s Hotel Owners

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In this episode of the Skift Travel Podcast, Sarah Kopit and Seth Borko break down one of the most important structural tensions in the hotel industry today. The conversation builds on Sarah’s latest feature, The Squeeze, which looks at how rising costs are reshaping hotel ownership across the United States.

At the center of the story is a simple but powerful dynamic. Costs are rising faster than revenue. Labor is more expensive, debt is harder to refinance, and property improvement plans required by brands are becoming more difficult to fund. At the same time, demand is softening and room rates are not keeping pace with inflation. The result is a growing squeeze on owners who are responsible for operating the physical hotels.

Meanwhile, the brands themselves are benefiting from asset-light models that allow them to scale globally and generate strong returns without owning the underlying real estate. That divergence is raising bigger questions about the long-term balance of the model.

As technology lowers the barrier to going independent and owners rethink what they are paying for, the episode explores whether the traditional franchise system still works the way it once did, and what might need to change next.

Presented by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Viasat Ads⁠⁠⁠⁠. Click ⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more!

Watch This Episode

The number of the week is 7%. Anybody have a guess what that is? It is tax day here in the United States of America.

It is April 15th. All of our personal tax returns are due, and 7% is the number of Americans who wait until today to file their taxes. Seth, when did you file your taxes?

I filed a week ago, so a little bit in advance, but I wasn’t a March filer.

I wasn’t that prepared. Yeah.

I did the same actually, because I work for Skift and I have always had a corporate job. I’ve always been a bit of a corporate man. I just have a W-2.

I could do an easy file. My husband, on the other hand, I blame all of this. Oh, he’s a freelancer, which makes things infinitely more confusing, or he’s self-employed essentially.

So there’s all kinds of fun things that you can do when that happens.

And when I was in law school, the only thing or the best thing I should say, not the only thing, but the best thing I ever learned about taxes is that you should never do them yourself if you can help it.

Yeah.

So we don’t.

Yeah.

So yeah, so that’s it.

I’m so excited for the like the TurboTax ads to end. If you’re not an American, you may not be familiar with how for the last month you get bombard with these ads and then just stop. Shut down.

Yes, yes, yes.

2:05

Refunds And Reality

So that’s that. And the other thing that we heard about Tax Day, it was just kind of interesting that I saw Bailey wrote a story about how tax returns are actually coming in a little light this year.

And it totally makes sense that, I mean, what is the, like, if you’re going to get a couple thousand dollars back from the government, which I think is kind of like a very typical number. I mean, what is like the thing that you want to do with it?

Vacation. It’s spring break. You just paid for your spring break that you just took or are taking.

Absolutely.

And that has historically happened a lot. It makes complete and total sense to me. If it were more money than that, you’d feel like, I should probably do something more practical.

If it’s less than, maybe it’s like, we’ll go out to dinner. But it’s like perfect weekend getaway amounts of money.

Of course, that bonus is really just your interest-free loans to the government being returned to you.

Absolutely. And for all of you out there, for all of you listeners who really like play that game and are like, I refuse to give the government, like I want my tax, like I want that number to come back, zero. I applaud you.

I am not that person. I am too risk-averse for that. I do enjoy my little tax refund, even though I know that practically I am giving the government a little bit more money than I probably need to.

But it’s not been great for the travel industry this year because they’ve been coming in light, apparently.

Yeah, my tax refund was not good this year. It’s not pleasant. So I actually owed a little bit extra, so it was not a good one.

So I’m not putting any extra stress.

Were you able to figure out why without divulging too much personal information?

Welcome to The Skift Travel Podcast. We’re talking about our tax returns in public.

We’ll see how many people listen to The Skift Travel Podcast after going through our personal…

For our loyal listeners, my social security number is… Yeah. It’s all good news.

It was all good news. But it was some investments. It was some investments that I wasn’t, that just came in the last minute.

There you go.

Excellent.

Yeah. It’s good news, right? That’s what I try to tell myself, but it didn’t feel good.

Well, and it feels good for it to be over.

In addition to the commercials, every year, every year when I sign that, I always get to sign his spouse as well.

4:34

Filing Jointly Milestone

I don’t know how you guys do it in your house, but I always find that kind of humorous.

That was…

For any of you who know us, my Alex and I, my husband, the facts that he is taxpayer and I’m spouse is funny.

This was our first year.

Yeah.

Married.

Oh, right.

Jointly. So big milestone. Big milestone.

Of all the things, of all the things that marriage.

We are fish.

In the eyes of the most important US government agency, we are officially married as of today.

Yeah. There you go.

There you go.

5:15

Behind The Big Feature

So we had some other fun things that happened this week.

At Skift, I published an article. Big one.

A big one. It was a great feature. I mean, that’s really what I want to talk about.

Well, let’s start with kind of the athlete post-game interview. How does it feel to be done? Did you close a million and one tabs?

Is it like a giant sigh of relief when you sign that tax return, you hit publish on that article?

I would love to hear from other journalists how it is for you, even after all of these years, even after 25 years of doing this. When it’s like a small article, it’s just like you publish it and it goes out to the world, it’s fine.

But when you do like a 4,000 word feature, I get nervous. It’s scary to hit that button. But then it’s really nice because, so I would say it is good, but it’s only half the process.

It’s almost like you publish, but then you send it to all of your sources, and you post it on LinkedIn, and you do a podcast about it, blah, blah, blah. But I would say this is all of it’s fun.

To be fair, writing enterprise feature articles and working for somewhere that will allow you to do so and fund your endeavors is a, I mean, that’s like rock and roll. That doesn’t happen very often anymore.

So it’s all fun, but this is just, so now we’re in promotion phase. Now we’re in like, come on, folks, why don’t you give it a read?

And you should give it a read. The article is called The Squeeze, Inside the Crisis Crushing America’s Hotel Owners.

And we should give a shout out to our creative and our design team, because the icon of this article, it’s animated, it moves, and it’s a little unnerving. It’s a little scary thing. It’s like the Adams family.

It’s like things hand crushing a hotel.

Maybe in post, we can have Monica or Will put the hand right over us. Like both of us, Seth, crushing our heads.

Yeah, but we’re doing a thumbnail. It’s all around.

7:29

Hotel Owners In Crisis

Yeah.

So basically, the way that all of this started is, many of you may have remembered Seth and I talking about an article I wrote, about a month and a half ago, about Minnesota and about hotel operators there, and just about the batshit crazy situation

they found themselves in unwittingly. Like it popped up around them and they were the stars of a lot of the protest activity, legal activity, enforcement activity, you name it, hotels were right in the center of it.

And so that started a series, where this is the second edition of, that really shines a spotlight or gives some sunshine to hotel owner operators.

Because we talk about brands a lot, like we talk about Hilton, we talk about Hyatt, we talk about loyalty. But I think that maybe not forget, but yeah, the little operator.

I think that was the lesson from your Minneapolis story was that it was a Hilton flag property that found itself at the center of this ICE crisis. And Department of Homeland Security tweeted at them. Hilton said, they’ve been fired.

Everyone made an ICE. DHS went on and did its own thing. Hilton went on and did its own thing.

They are both multi-billion dollar organizations, government, corporate in their own way. And what you found when you actually showed up was, oh, the person who’s left holding the bag is the owner. And so this series, what’s it called, Sarah?

The series is called?

It’s called Disenfranchised.

It’s about the franchisee, the owner, and what’s left of them. So this one, I think, actually follows on pretty directly, and we were previewing it a little bit, pretty directly from our cost conversation last week on the podcast.

I was maybe leading that conversation a little bit more from an economics point of view. I was talking about cost disease, I was talking about labor, I was talking about the PPI and the CPI and the inflation and the economist perspective.

But you went out and you got the human perspective.

Yeah.

So this story opens with an individual hotel owner, right?

Yeah. So I talked to Niana Patel. She also goes by Nancy.

So she really is, I think, just the absolute, like she is the typical hotel owner out there. Like she’s in her 50s. She owns one hotel.

It’s a Red Roof Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas. She is part of an immigrant family who came via India to England, to the United States in the 1970s. The family built kind of a little empire of hotels.

They had over a couple of dozen at one point, but now they’re down to one. She’s down to one.

And she just told me about how difficult it is to operate in 2026, and how much more difficult it is to operate now from a cost perspective than it ever has been before.

When I first talked to her, I think our meeting was for 10 o’clock, and she was a little late, and I pinged her, and I said, is now still a good time? And she came on, she’s like, oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

She’s like, I’ve worked five overnight shifts in a row. And she owns the hotel, but she’s working the overnight shift because labor is one of those things that is just so much more expensive. And if you go through the-

Makes our W2 jobs look cushy, doesn’t it?

Yes.

Yes, it does.

11:16

Costs Squeezing Operators

So the big things that I heard from people about, it’s just a general, I mean, it isn’t just general inflation, like the cost of eggs, although for those who serve breakfast, I’m sure that’s part of it.

But it’s things like insurance is hugely expensive now. I mean, debt was another big one that came up all of the time.

A lot of these folks who either refinanced or took on loans, as many of us did because we looked at the prices and we’re like, hey, here it is, 3%.

If they, you know, any of those that are coming to now are up to be, have to be refinanced, we’re at like 6.5, 7%. That’s what she thought hers would be refinanced in 2027.

So we have like big chunky things like this, construction, lumber, the cost of like doing a pip and, you know, buying goods when there are there tariffs? Are there not tariffs? Maybe tariffs, maybe not tariffs.

You just dropped some lingo, pip.

Yeah.

I think that there are probably three, you can correct me if I’m wrong, Sarah.

This is me as a reader interpreting your story. I saw three big buckets of cost. I saw labor and you specifically called out, well, maybe these are what we’ll talk about.

I saw labor, I saw interest rates and debt financing, and then I saw the pip and effectively the construction and all of those pieces. That’s sort of when I read it, I saw those big three buckets of, this is where we’re really getting squeezed from.

Is that correct?

Yeah, I think it’s those items which are more expensive.

The other thing that is real, and so where the squeeze morphs a little bit is that the domestic inbound tourism or tourism in general for this type, for this mid-scale or economy hotel is decreasing.

So, that’s the other part of it, is that they are, so everything costs more and their room rates have gone up a little bit. They have not matched inflation.

Totally. At all. Yeah.

Well, not at all.

They’re in line, like I think a couple of points behind inflation.

They’re effectively at or slightly below inflation adjusted rates, whereas their costs have outpaced inflation. Dramatically.

Yes. Dramatically. And then you’ve got, it’s not a huge drop-off, but it’s enough when you put those two together that the 2% down in occupancy rates is tough.

I mean, I talked to one analyst who said that he thought it just estimating that everything that has gone on politically has probably cost the industry.

He said 300 basis points, which I’m going to say to you, because I very rarely get to say basis points, because, you know.

We love a basis point. This is a basis point approved space. This is a safe space for basis points.

Please, please use them. A basis point is 1 one hundredth of a percent. So one basis point is 0.01%, 10 basis points is 0.1%, and 100 basis points is 1%.

And the finance folks love, because they talk about bonds and they’ll move from 3.52 to 3.56, they love to talk in basis points because it’s a little bit simpler. But when lay people get to use basis points, we just-

It just makes us feel, we just sound smart and fancy. So that’s 3%. So if you have a very high fixed cost business as hotels are losing 3% just out of the air because of the geopolitical environment.

I have a controversial hot take on this that I want to run by you, but I want to save it a little bit to the end.

15:17

Fees Brands Take Off Top

I want to go through the structure of this article a little bit because I really like it. So what I read was cost side, we’ve got these 3 big costs.

We’ve got labor, we’ve got debt, and we’ve got PIPs, which are, we haven’t introduced yet, the property improvement plans, which is the brand mandated facelifts every couple of years in order to maintain, you know, Red Roof Inn is a brand, they want

You’re refreshed.

Those are your 3 costs.

And then to your point, it’s not just a cost push, it’s a squeeze. And then on the other side, you’ve got decline in to flat revenue. And then, of course, as you point out, the franchise fee, which comes straight off the top.

Right.

Yeah. And so that’s like the kicker, is that the franchisor gets paid regardless of any of these things. I mean, assuming people come, but they get paid on top line revenue.

They do not get paid on profit. They get paid 5%, 6%, and that’s like the baseline fee. There’s all sorts of other fees that you can find in their franchise disclosure document.

If you want to have a really good time on a Friday or Saturday night, you can pull out the Hyatt-Hilton Marriott 2025 FDD, take a look at it. It’s about 400 pages, a lot of light reading in there.

But it’ll spell out for you exactly in glorious detail what all the fees are that you are expected to pay as a franchisee. But like I said, they come off the top. And so the hotel brands, I mean, they’re making money left and right.

They truly are making more money than they ever have. Many of the stocks are at all-time highs, or at least they were pre-, I haven’t checked. I haven’t checked the post-war impact.

You have a great example that doesn’t matter about the war, right?

What’s the example you used in the story?

17:21

Asset Light Winners Losers

So when Hilton spun out, so when Hilton went kind of asset light, so to speak.

Asset light, this is another term of ours, another like industry buzz term, asset light, which means they no longer own the physical assets. So they spun out their actual hotel real estate into a REIT, which is a real estate investment trust.

And that is also a publicly traded company. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange. You can look it up.

If you do a chart of Hilton versus Park, you will see what looks like this. So Hilton is up and to the right by hundreds and hundreds of percent, and Park is down and to the right by 22.

I’m looking at the chart right now. Since 2017, Hilton Worldwide is up 468 percent, and since the spinoff Park Hotels and Resorts, the REIT is down 22 percent.

18:26

Franchise Model Breaking Point

And that’s the one, like that’s the chart, because what it tells you is that the market, which is, I mean, it can be irrational, but generally, people want to make money, right?

They take a motion out of it a little bit. They know, the market knows that the asset light model, the intellectual property and franchising operation that hotels have now gone to, that is the more profitable model.

And the franchisers know this, and they talk about it. This is not something that anyone is really hiding, but what happens now is really a big question. Can the franchise model survive what is going on?

I mean, colloquially, just like when I asked people, when I was at the AHOA conference in Philadelphia, that is for hotel owners, I ask every single person I talk to, I asked them that question, and just kind of like off the cuff, they’re like, oh

yeah, no. And some of them would say, well, some of them would say, well, maybe it survives, but it has to change. Like it has to change, like we’re all going to go bankrupt.

19:41

Do Brands Earn Fees

Let me ask you the big question, which is the core question to can the franchise model survive.

Are the brands earning their franchise fee? Are they driving more in book and send their collectin in franchise fees? That to me is the core question.

So I talked to a lot of hotel owners.

The more savvy they are, the more they’re into this. It’s like they looked at me and were like, I can do a lot of this stuff myself now.

Yeah.

20:11

Tech Enables Independence

Like I can, like with our friend Claude, who Claude is friends with all of us these days, or just with less expensive PMS, or basically the jump to go independent isn’t as-

Is a lot easier.

Yeah.

The wall is not as high as it used to be.

And what struck me, can I read a quote from your article?

Yeah, sure.

Will we need a brand in the future? Maybe not, Patel Muse. So Patel is the lead.

Yeah, Nancy.

Nancy Patel, a single owner of a red roof in, an independent hotel owner, who’s the future of the story.

Will we need a brand in the future? Maybe not. She pointed to technology platforms and distribution tools that can replicate much of what a franchise provides without the fees, the pips, or the mandates.

So that is the core question. If you are- We interviewed on this podcast a while ago, the guy who created the Standard Hotel.

I think it’s been clear to me for a while that this- I mean, standard is now part of high, but at the Standard Hotel in New York City didn’t need a brand. It built its own thing.

But a Red Roof Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas, that to me needs a brand. And what’s so interesting is that now Nancy Patel, who’s the owner of that Corpus Christi Red Roof Inn, is thinking to herself, okay, I don’t need a brand. That’s the shift.

Like the standard was always the Ace Hotel, the standard hotel, the Ned, whatever. They were always able to do it in these big global cities, these fancy lifestyle hotels. But could a Red Roof Inn in Corpus Christi do it?

21:47

Why Brands Still Matter

It’s funny, maybe off topic a bit.

But when I went to Saudi for the first time for an event, so Rafat, our CEO, was going to be there too. And he was giving me tips on where to stay. And I was like, oh, I’m sure I’ll find somewhere.

He’s like, stay at a brand. And I was like, I’m sure I’ll be able to find somewhere. He’s like, no, Sarah, stay at a brand.

I’m like, okay, okay.

Okay, okay, I will.

I stayed in an aloft, which I believe is part of Bonvoy, which is great because I am a Bonvoy member. I got points. But this was just like a conversation between colleagues, and I had never been there before.

And he was very insistent that I go with a brand, which was probably a franchise operation as well. But I mean, that’s the real power. That’s the power of those names.

That’s the power of the licensor is that when you have never been to a place, whether it be Riyadh or Corpus Christi, Texas or somewhere in Iowa, Washington state, and you don’t know where you are, you’re driving around, you probably are like, oh

good, a Marriott. Well, thank you. Thank you. This is great, because I know that it’s going to be exactly like it is going to be.

It’s going to be exactly like the Marriott I stayed in three weeks ago, or pretty close.

So this was going to be my hot take. I know exactly what it’s going to be, unless the owners haven’t done their pips, unless they haven’t kept up with the deferred maintenance. And as a customer, there’s nothing you hate more than checking into.

Yes.

We won’t use a specific brand, but into a branded hotel.

And there’s mildew, and it’s old, and it’s dated, and they’ve got a phone from the 90s. And come on.

That’s the thing that I hate. Yeah.

23:49

PIPs And Brand Standards

So I have to give a little bit of a hot take here and play a little bit of Devil’s Advocate, and I really am sympathetic to the independent hotel owner.

Yeah.

Or even to the, not independent to the, just to the hotel owner, even the franchise hotel owner.

I’m sympathetic. But if you haven’t done a pip in 10 years, I actually think the brands should be pipping you.

Yeah.

I hate to say it.

And a lot of the franchisees that I talk to, they agree. They really, they’re like, we should be doing our pips. Like, because, you know, it’s a vicious cycle, right?

Like, you can’t charge more for a room that smells like smoke as mildew in the shower. Like, so they do know that. It’s just, it’s a brutal time right now to do a pip.

By the way, it’s a collective action problem.

If some people are getting excuses, if you’re being weak on certain, your brand is only as good as the weakest brand, the weakest property in your franchise. Once I stay with a bad X, Y, Z brand, I might write it off.

And so if I am the owner who’s got a big, put a lot of money into a great, beautiful brand X in city X, and the brand X in city Y, sorry, I’m like using lots of X, but you got the same brand in a different city, haven’t done their pip, I might not

even consider that, you know, you are tied together. That’s what you’re part of what paying your franchise fee does. You expect a return and you are tying yourself together. And you do expect the brand to play a bit of umpire, a bit of referee.

They need to protect. If they only own the IP, they’ve got to enforce that IP. Yeah, that’s their job.

Totally agree.

Well, and the other thing, and the other thing is like we’re all hospitality nerds here. Like we all, we all know this stuff. I was, I do occasionally explain my job to my family or I try anyway.

And I was explaining this one story, and I was getting a lot of like kind of confused looks from people. And they were like, what do you mean Marriott doesn’t own the hotels?

You know, I don’t think, I don’t think it’s even widely, I think people are aware of the franchise system, mostly from like McDonald’s.

Fast food.

Yeah.

Yeah. Totally a fast food thing.

But I don’t think that it’s well known from consumers, consumers who use hotels, that these hotels are individually owned and operated.

26:07

Asset Light Versus Owners

Yeah.

Can I give you another hot take on the stock price thing? Absolutely. I don’t want to be a shill and I don’t want to come to the defense of the brands, but you point this out.

In the story, Hilton has outperformed, the asset light version of Hilton has outperformed its former asset-heavy REIT subsidiary by, I mean, not even comparable. I kind of think that that’s working as intended.

I think part of it, unfortunately, is that you point out multiple times in the story, Hilton is growing off of international expansion. The Hilton, like of course, Hilton stock is up. The point of being asset light is that you can diversify.

Hilton is able to expand and go into not one city in Texas to another city in Texas, not a portfolio of a hundred, they have a portfolio of millions. You kind of set it up as one versus the other, but they’re different business models.

A hotel owner has concentrated, highly financed risk exposure to a specific geography. Hilton has by design diversified itself globally so that it can tap into sources of global growth around the world. And that’s a great strategy.

If you can be anywhere in the world where there is growth, of course your stock is going to outperform someone, someone’s stock who is tied to a hundred debt finance properties in domestic America. It’s actually is correct. You know what I mean?

Yeah, the model is working by design.

It’s just not working for everyone.

Correct, correct, yeah.

Meaning the hotel owner. It’s not working as well for them.

Another one of the folks that I talked to, I asked him, I said, what do you think when you hear Chris Mazzetta and company, get up on the earnings calls and talk about just how glorious the world is.

And he said, and I think this was one of the best quotes I got from the whole piece. He just said, it would be better for me to be a shareholder in the parent company than it would for me to own the assets, which create that massive share boon.

Yeah. I don’t know if this is the right way to think about it, but it’s a great point. You’re fundamentally invested in different things.

Hilton probably has more in common with Disney as in terms of an IP. Hilton in many ways has more in common with a media company than it does with a real estate.

Yeah, it’s an intellectual property.

In one case, you’ve decided to be a real estate investor. In another case, you’ve decided to be an intellectual property investor.

And it just so happens at this point in American history, intellectual property has provided greater returns than real estate. Is that kind of the story?

And we found this weird niche of branded hotels where we combine intellectual property with real estate, and we sliced it up in ways where you can invest in each part of a hotel separately.

You can invest in the real estate part of the hotel, you can invest in the IP part of the hotel if you’d like. And it turns out IP investment has been a great strategy, maybe?

29:25

World Cup Hotel Stress Test

Yeah, so the next one that I’m going to write is…

So this is a series called This and Francesc. Thank you for plugging the name for me, Seth. So the next one I’m going to write is about the World Cup.

So, and just the stress test that is the World Cup.

So we don’t really know what’s going to happen yet with the World Cup, and as it pertains to hotels and hospitality, we’ve gotten a few kind of shaky indicators, FIFA’s canceling rooms, although, I don’t know, they say, well, we were going to do that

anyway, but were they? Like, maybe they’d hoped that they were going to fill those rooms.

I don’t know, that we all know the issues with inbound tourism, we’re dealing with wars and lots of anti-American sentiment, and here we are having the World Cup. So the next one that I’m working on right now is about that.

North America is having the World Cup, Sarah, before we get too much hate mail from our Canadian and Mexican listeners.

Yes.

Sorry.

Yeah. But if you are a hotel owner, if you are a hotel owner listening to this, and you would like to talk to me about what you are seeing in your city, or with your hotel, or with your booking around the World Cup, please reach out.

I’m very findable, but sek at skift.com. You can contact me on Signal as well. We don’t have to use names.

I will protect your anonymity. We do that here at Skift. So I would love to hear from you.

I can’t wait for that one.

And the World Cup is just fascinating. It’s just like a can’t look away kind of thing.

Well, it’s a planned live tourism mega event that potentially can go off the rails for like a thousand reasons right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it probably won’t, but it could. But it could in ways that we never would have anticipated two years ago when we kind of started to talk about this.

31:42

Swiss Cheese Risk Stack

It feels like in the airplane world, they talk about like Swiss cheese model of safety.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

You know, I have heard this before, but do tell me again, I have heard this.

It’s like when things go wrong, they call it Swiss cheese. The idea is that one sheet of Swiss cheese has like a small hole in it.

Yeah.

And the idea is you put lots of stacks of Swiss cheese together, and each layer probably blocks up the hole of each layer.

But every once in a while, if there’s enough holes, something will get through all of the holes of all the stacks of Swiss cheese. And that’s sort of what I feel like this happened. We’re the World Cup, it’s like if we get an…

American sentiment is tough, but maybe we’ll get past that. And the visa wait lines are tough, but maybe we’ll get past that. And the public transit is challenging, but maybe we’ll get past that.

And the marketing is challenging, but maybe we’ll get past that. But it’s like, there’s so many… I don’t know.

I don’t know, Sarah. I’m worried.

The last thing that we can… I mean, it could be a big weather event. I’m trying to think.

Yeah.

I mean, so many other things on top of this.

All the other things that could go wrong.

All right. Well, let us, let us, let Sarah know if you got any World Cup thoughts. We will be covering this story.

I’m going to do some research on it. Sarah’s going to do some reporting on it. Let us know.

Let’s go into this home stretch here.

33:06

Winners Losers And Wrap

Do we have any winners or losers for this week?

I honestly haven’t thought about winners or losers this week, Seth. I’ve been very busy. Do you have any winners or losers?

Yeah, I got a winner.

Okay. Editor-in-chief of Skift, Sarah Kopit, who just published a wonderful feature story.

That’s cheating. It’s cheating.

I would say, no, I mean, I think that’s a great winner. Kristin Stathoseff. What’s that?

Okay. I’m going to say my winner of the week is Sarah Kopit for publishing a feature. Having published research, having published long-form stuff, it’s a challenge and I’m going to give it to you.

And my loser of this week, just call back to previous episodes, continues to be just airline CEOs in general, who since our podcast, now, I think two weeks ago, have continued to either defect or be shown the door, depending on who they are.

They’re all spending more time. The winner is the airline CEO’s families. They’re all designed to spend a lot more time with their families.

Golf courses, country clubs, all winners, all winners.

I know, I kind of, and then, I mean, did you see the, we didn’t talk about this. Maybe we should save this for the last pod, but you saw the Scott Kirby floating to combine United and American Airlines.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I mean, that was from Bloomberg.

Bloomberg reported that.

And I really, when I saw that headline, having worked at Bloomberg before, I like, that is a triple bylined people familiar story. Like he definitely floated that.

What a different world we are in from when Frontier and Spirit wanted to merge and they were blocked for antitrust. And now Spirit is bankrupt and JetBlue is potentially looking for an out. And they may not get it because they’re two buyers.

They’re going to merge with one another. Insane. No.

Insane.

Insane. The airline industry is just a, it is a font of entertainment and activity for those of us who are into that stuff.

All right. So another winner then are the M&A attorneys, partners who have lots of business. And another loser are the M&A attorney associates who are working overnights to get this done.

Yep.

All those people. Absolutely. That is a good one.

That’s a good one to close on for this week, Seth.

All right. We’ll see you next week, everyone. Thanks for listening.