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    May 1, 2024 · updated May 9, 2026 · 6 min read

    The end-of-year travel column the trade press won't publish.

    The end-of-year travel column the trade press won't publish — by Thomas Jankowski, aided by AI
    Consolidation's accounting logic— TJ x AI

    The major travel trade publications used to run an end-of-year column where somebody on staff said the uncomfortable thing about the year. They mostly stopped, somewhere around 2019, for the obvious reason that the publications work in a small ad market with a small set of large advertisers, and the uncomfortable thing about the year is increasingly the same set of large advertisers. The category-trade-press cannot bite the hand that pays it without the hand reconsidering the relationship.

    I am not on a masthead and I am not protecting an ad relationship. The list below is the year-end column the trade press did not run for 2025. Five observations the operator class has been having privately for some months and that the publications I read have not put on the record.

    1. Consolidation has decoupled from product quality and the trade press is no longer admitting it. The major hotel-brand portfolios in 2025 carry between fifteen and twenty-five sub-brands each, depending on the parent. The sub-brands were originally a market-segmentation strategy and have become an accounting structure. The product-quality variance inside a single sub-brand at this point exceeds the variance between sub-brands; the consumer reads the brand and gets a hotel that may or may not match the brand's posted positioning, depending on which property, which year, which franchisee, and which capex cycle. The trade press of a decade ago wrote that. The trade press of 2025 runs the press release that announces the new sub-brand and does not point out that the old sub-brands have drifted past their original definitions. The category needs the press to do the second job; the press is not doing it; the consumer is left to figure it out from review aggregators that are themselves running their own undisclosed incentive structures.

    2. OTA take rates are not actually coming down and the supply-side knows it. There has been a steady trade-press drumbeat through 2024-2025 about how AI-driven distribution will reduce the OTA share of the booking funnel and bring take rates down toward the supply-side. The data the supply-side actually sees is the inverse. Take rates on the major OTA platforms in 2025 are flat to up versus 2022, with the increases concentrated in the smaller-supply-side categories (independents, small chains, vacation rentals at non-Airbnb scale). The aggregated OTA channel share of bookings is not declining materially. The AI-distribution story is real on the consumer side and not real on the take-rate side, and the supply-side has internalized this. The trade press has not yet run the explicit version of that paragraph, because the OTAs are large advertisers and the trade press cannot.

    3. The labor reconstitution of the front-of-house workforce is not on schedule. Every major hotel and airline operator told the trade press through 2022 and 2023 that the post-COVID labor reconstitution would be substantially complete by 2025. The 2025 reality is that front-of-house staffing is at roughly 80-85 percent of pre-2020 levels in most categories, with the last 15-20 percent being structurally hard to recover. The wage compression that was supposed to bring the workforce back partially failed. The flexible-scheduling and benefits restructuring that was supposed to bring it back partially failed. The compensating-quality-substitution (more self-service, more automation, more AI-augmented front-desk) has covered some of the gap but not all of it, and the consumer-facing service quality has degraded in ways the operator class is internally aware of and the trade press has not run the consolidated version of. The category is operating at a permanently lower labor density and the implications are larger than the trade press has named.

    4. The supply-chain hangover from 2020-2022 is still in the operating cost structure. The pandemic-era supply-chain disruptions were supposed to flush through by 2024. They mostly did, on the input-cost line. They did not, on the deferred-maintenance line. Hotels that postponed renovations, capex cycles, FF&E refresh, and HVAC overhauls during 2020-2022 are now carrying a multi-year deferred-maintenance backlog that the 2025 operating budgets are not large enough to clear. The trade press writes about RevPAR recovery as if the recovery were complete; the operator class running these properties knows the operating-cost structure is being temporarily understated by the deferred maintenance, and that the next 24-36 months will see the catch-up costs hit the P&L. The clean-recovery narrative the trade press is running is somewhere between premature and incorrect. Properties on the wrong side of the deferred-maintenance curve are going to underperform their forecasts in 2026-2027 in ways the 2025 reporting did not predict.

    5. The loyalty-program optics are now diverging from the loyalty-program economics. The major airline and hotel loyalty programs in 2025 are accounting-class profit centers that the parent operating businesses depend on. Devaluations of mileage and points have run effectively continuously since 2018, with the rate of devaluation accelerating in 2023-2024. The trade press writes about devaluations on a per-event basis and does not run the consolidated multi-year picture. The consolidated picture is that a frequent traveler in 2025 redeeming points earned over the prior decade is getting roughly half the redemption value, on average, that the same points would have produced in 2018. The loyalty program is now, in operating terms, a high-margin financial product loosely affiliated with the underlying travel business. The optics the trade press carries treat the program as an aspirational consumer-loyalty mechanism. The economics treat it as a credit-card-co-brand revenue line that the airline or hotel runs to recapture margin lost to OTA take rates. The read that survives is that the loyalty-program-as-aspiration era ended sometime around 2022 and nobody at any masthead has run the obituary.

    This is what an end-of-year column looks like when the writer does not have to maintain the relationship with the major advertisers. The five observations are not new and they are not surprising to anyone running an operating business in the category. They are not new because the operator class has been having the conversations for two to three years; they are not surprising because the data is there for anyone willing to look at the operating-finance underneath the marketing layer.

    The trade press is not going to run this column. The trade publications I read have a structural reason not to and the structural reason is not changing in 2026. Year-end columns by 2026 will continue to be measured against the advertiser relationships the publications need to maintain, and the readers who want the unvarnished version will continue to source it from independent writers, podcasts, Substacks, and the small-publication operator-class who do not depend on the same revenue.

    Take this for what it is: one operator's read on the year, written from the position of not having to be polite to anyone whose ad budget pays the bills. The five observations are the ones I would have made at the masthead I do not work at. The category will continue. The trade press will continue. The gap between what the operator class privately knows and what the trade press will publicly print will continue to widen, and the operators looking for the candid version will continue to find it outside the publications that historically owned the category.

    —TJ