Top hotel executives gathered in New York City this week for the New York University International Hospitality Investment Forum, where the strength of leisure travel, the shape of the U.S. economy and the accelerating influence of AI dominated the conversation.
Throughout multiple panels with hotel CEOs, discussion of business travel or the corporate travel segment was conspicuously absent. Instead, executives focused on the continued strength of leisure.
Hyatt Hotels Corp. CEO Mark Hoplamazian during a panel discussion on Monday said the company has seen "really, really durable" demand from higher-income leisure travelers that began post-Covid. He said 50 percent of Hyatt's revenue is now leisure-driven, compared to about 35 percent pre-Covid.
That increased share of leisure revenue doesn't mean that the portion of Hyatt's business that serves corporate travelers has shrunk, Hoplamazian noted, but rather that Hyatt's lifestyle and leisure portfolio has grown.
The K-Shaped Economy
The pattern of lasting luxury leisure demand in recent quarters is part of what some executives and observers have called a broader "K-shaped economy.
Adding some numbers to the growing wealth bifurcation playing out in the United States, Tourism Economics president Adam Sacks said higher-income households—those making $150,000 or more—account for 51 percent of leisure travel spending on lodging, despite representing only 19 percent of all U.S. households.
"The top 1 percent of income earners have seen nearly a doubling of their net worth as a share of household income over the past year," Sacks said, "and the top 20 percent have seen a 40 percent increase in net worth over one year."
Despite those figures, Hilton Worldwide CEO Christopher Nassetta during a Monday panel said that given the more positive gains in the midscale tiers so far in 2026, he thinks the U.S. is now experiencing a "C-shaped" economy—"C for convergence."
"While the high end is still doing well," Nassetta said, "You're starting to see the mid-chainscale segments, and even the lower chainscale segments, come up."
Some factors driving that convergence, Nassetta said, include what he called a business-friendly and tax-friendly environment, government deregulation and "massive investment cycles" in AI, infrastructure and data centers—projects he posited would drive jobs to the middle class.
"Most of the people in this room aren't going out and building a data center," Nassetta said. "You might be financing them, you might be investing in them, but you're not going out and digging ditches and building the power facilities and building the bridges and the tunnels and the ports that are being done. That is all getting done by the middle class."
AI Takes Center Stage
While multiple conference sessions were dedicated to AI, the topic was a constant thread throughout nearly every NYU panel as executives discussed how they're deploying AI within their own organizations and debated the impact that large language model players like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude will have on hotel search and distribution.
On that first point, IHG Hotels & Resorts CEO Elie Maalouf said "we've moved way beyond experimentation," as IHG (and its competitors) embeds AI into distribution, marketing, booking, hotel operations and corporate efficiency.
"Our costs last year were up 1 percent, this year it will go down 3 percent," Maalouf said. "AI is not the only reason, but it's putting a ceiling on the cost of growth. While our revenue growth continues, it's opening up the jaws of the strength of the organization, getting us closer to our customers, making our hotels profitable. It's still the beginning of the beginning but it's way past experimentation."
Aimbridge Hospitality CEO Craig Smith on Tuesday said that hotel companies can put AI into three buckets: AI that drives business, AI that delivers cost savings and AI that improves corporate efficiency.
As for the impending disruption to hotel search, executives acknowledged that travelers are already bypassing traditional search engines to use LLMs for travel planning and that they will soon be using agentic AI to book hotel stays.
"There's a big race right now to figure out what is going to be the dominant front end for consumers going forward," said EY managing director Umar Riaz. The contenders, Riaz said, include the hotel loyalty platforms, the online travel agencies—reinvented for AI—or the LLMs creating an entirely new front end.
While some suggest that AI-driven distribution disruption risks bringing the hotel industry back 20 years to the OTA wars, not all executives are worried about impending changes to hotel search.
Maalouf said while IHG gets 60 to 70 percent of its room nights from its more than 165 million IHG Rewards members, they also rely on infrequent guests to fill hotel rooms, and that's where LLMs could be just another channel to fill that capacity. To that end, IHG on Wednesday announced it had introduced an app within ChatGPT and planned to add conversational search capabilities powered by AI on its website and app.
"We need hundreds of millions of reservations a year to fill our million rooms; we need a range of distribution partners," Maalouf said. "So we're working with [the LLMs] now… We're not worried about more competition in the distribution space. It may actually turn out to be a good thing for our business and for our owners."