Behind the Stays

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Special guest:

Andrew Humphries — Bridge Hospitality Partners
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-humphries-66a1918/

Are the biggest hotel brands still in the business of running great hotels, or are distribution and fee streams becoming the real product?

This week, Zach Busekrus, Ben Wolff, Edwin Kramer and Scott Eddy are joined by Andrew Humphries, partner and co-founder of Bridge Hospitality Partners. After decades in luxury hospitality, Andrew brings an operator's perspective to the hotel investment conversation, fresh fro...

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This Week’s Guest:

Noelle Homsy, Co-Founder, ENVI Lodges
Website: envilodges.com (live-checked October 26)
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/noelle-homsy
Email: [email protected]

Your Host:

Zach Busekrus - Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.li...

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Fifty episodes in, we're skipping the news and handing out the hospitality awards nobody asked for.

Zach, Ben, Edwin and a returning Scott Eddy each nominate, defend and vote across five categories. For "The Hotel I'd Steal," Scott and Edwin both take Marina Bay Sands - Edwin to bankroll a portfolio of tiny rural hotels with its profits - while Ben makes a play for Vermejo, Ted Turner's half-million-acre New Mexico reserve, and Zach stays closer to home with San...

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This Week’s Guest:

Connect with Janice Stitzer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janicestitzer/

Your Host:

Zach Busekrus - Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.ins...

This Week's Guest:

Alex Cabañas
Executive Chairman, Pyramid Global Hospitality
Founder and CEO of Astound Ventures
https://astound-ventures.com/

What happens when the hotel front desk disappears, but hospitality gets more personal?

This week, Zach Busekrus, Ben Wolff and Edwin Kramer are joined by Alex Cabañas, executive chairman of Pyramid Global Hospitality and founder and CEO of Astound Ventures, for a conversation about the changes that could actually improve hotel margins.

Alex explains why he's investing in hospitality's own problems, from energy management and dis...

This Week’s Guest:

Shawn Cioto - Vice President of Operations, Dovetail + Co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawn-cioto-914264b/

Your Host:

Zach Busekrus - Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Shawn Cioto, VP of Operations at Dovetail + Co, explains why the owner of seven hotels is taking management in-house: large management companies often miss the small, on-brand details that make independent lifestyle hotels special, from coffee sleeves and key cards to scent, lighting and music. He describes how Do...

Explore Ascend: www.joinascend.com

Connect with Zach Resnick: [email protected]

Connect with Cameron Resnick: [email protected]

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Follow Behind the Stays on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Connect with Zach Busekrus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharybusekrus/

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Zach Resnick could show business owners how to get far more value from their miles and points. The problem? Even people who paid for the advice often didn't have time to follow it.

That lesson helped turn Easy Point into FlyFlat, and eventually Asce...

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Michael Wolf thought his career would be in government. He spent every summer in Washington, DC, and wanted the FBI. Then Bain came to campus, and he took a detour that turned into 15 years of startups.

Today he is the CEO of ResortPass, the world's largest marketplace focused on getting hotels more revenue from day guests. The idea starts with perishable inventory: hotels have mastered re...

This Week’s Guest:

Dina Belon-Sayre - President, Staypineapple Hotels
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinabelon/
Explore Staypineapple Hotels: https://www.staypineapple.com/

Your Host:

Zach Busekrus - Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Dina Belon-Sayre, President of Staypineapple Hotels, opens with a story from a Portland snowstorm when she waited tables herself, fed a stranded hotel and received a thank-you check from a guest. Her point: any Staypineapple employee is empowered to make the same call. She tr...

Scott is in Sicily, so Zach, Ben Wolff and Edwin Kramer take the docket. Edwin checks in from a new boutique hotel on Spain's Costa Blanca, and Ben is fresh from the glamping show.

The first story: Hilton's CIO says AI assistants have put online travel agencies under real threat, yet he expects personal AI agents to become commissionable channels too. The crew asks what "direct" even means when an agent that never sleeps keeps rate-shopping after the booking is made. Edwin says post-booking shopping could be a bigger disruption than the booking itself. Then Booking.com...

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This Week’s Guest:

Jennifer Barnwell - President, Curator Hotel & Resort Collection
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-barnwell-a8689ba/
Explore Curator Hotel & Resort Collection: https://www.curatorhotelsandresorts.com/team/jennifer-barnwell/

Your Host:

Zach Busekrus - Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Recorded live at the Independent Hotel Show in Miami, Zach sits down with Jennifer Barnwell, President of Curator Hotel & Resort Collection, for...

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This Week's Guest:

Heidi Zimmer — Founder, Wild Rice Retreat
Connect with Heidi: https://heidi-zimmer.com/
Explore Wild Rice Retreats: https://wildriceretreat.com/

Your Host:

Zach Busekrus — Journey
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachbusekrus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/behindthestays/

Ben Wolff — Founder of Onera & Oasi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wolff/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iambenwolff/

Heidi Zimmer closed on her construction financing...

The full squad is back. Royal Caribbean is taking a 50% stake in Sandals Resorts for roughly $3 billion, and the crew breaks down why a cruise line wants an all-inclusive hotel brand. Edwin runs the numbers on who is really serving whose guests, and Scott, who has known the Stewart family most of his life, explains why cruise companies can't build ships fast enough and are coming ashore instead.

Then it's Airbnb's hotel push: just shy of 4,000 hotels on the new listing format, hand-curated and aimed at independent and soft-brand three- and four-star properties. Ben weighs in as...

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Femme House website: https://stayfemmehouse.com/

Femme House on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/femmehouseaz/

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Vanessa Aguirre was in her bridal era when the idea for Femme House found her. A disappointing experience with her own wedding venue, a travel blogger's eye for what makes a stay shareable, and a hunch that bachelorettes deserved better than what Nashville was offering. So in 2020, with travel stopped, weddings cancelled, and everyone telling her she was crazy, she and her husband Jake bo...

Fresh off Independent Hotel Show Miami, Zach and Ben break down two days of conversations with eight owners, operators, and investors from across independent hospitality.
Before the full interviews roll out on This Week in Hospitality, this is the recap — the ideas that kept surfacing across every mic session, the moments that caught us off guard, and what these conversations say about where independent hospitality is actually headed.

Whether you own a property, back one, or build for the people who do, consider this your shortcut to what the industry's sharpest independents are thinking right now.

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Before Nature Nooks, he was a startup co-founder and product manager who'd done a stint as a senior program manager at Dollar Shave Club. Then he walked away from tech, bought seventeen acres of raw land in Sullivan, Maine, and — in a single summer — stood up a glamping retreat of three Scandinavian cabins and tw...

Blake Danner has spent his career inside the rooms where lifestyle hospitality was invented. Eleven years alongside Ian Schrager opening the Clift, Sanderson, and Shore Club. Seven years as founding COO of the Sydell Group, where he helped create Nomad, The Line, and Freehand — 11 hotels in seven years. A stint running operations at Proper Hospitality. And now, as COO of AKA Hotels & Hotel Residences, he's running a 16-property luxury serviced residence portfolio where the entry-level monthly rate starts at $30K and the loyalty program charges $750 just to join.

This week, Blake makes the case that the mid-size in...

Check out Lodgify claim your exclusive discount: https://www.lodgify.com/behind-the-stays/ 

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In just a moment you'll meet Austin Allison — co-founder and CEO of Pacaso, the co-ownership platform that's reimagining how people buy, use, and think about second homes.

Austin's dad was a carpenter. They lived paycheck to paycheck in a home with unfinished plywood floors because they couldn't afford carpet. Austin started working job sites with his dad at six or seven years old, and the thing it taught him wasn't carpentry — it was that you can build anything if you decide to. By...

TikTok Go was supposed to turn creators into a hotel distribution channel. Instead, a Skift investigation found dozens of AI-generated fake videos attached to real properties — fabricated suites, nonexistent amenities, faceless accounts — with one Sedona luxury resort racking up 17 flagged videos. The kicker: the hotel doesn't even sell through TikTok Go's booking partners. Scott says forget the AI part — someone can now recommend a hotel they've never visited, show rooms that don't exist, and disappear while the property deals with the fallout.

Then Airbnb quietly drops the most telling number of the year — testing reduced host fees as low as 6% wh...

Check out Lodgify claim your exclusive discount: https://www.lodgify.com/behind-the-stays/ 

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In just a moment you'll meet Lauren Blanford from Lost Woods — a glamping retreat and event property built on 160 acres of northern Michigan that started with two bell tents, a porta potty, and homemade bagels hand-delivered at sunrise.

Lauren and her husband Jason were living in Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood, raising young kids, feeling like two ships passing in the night. They put their condo up for sale, found a property they wanted to buy, and were ready to make the leap...

Hotel sales in the US are up 28% in the first half of 2026 — and a meaningful chunk of that activity is chasing bad Yelp reviews, not trophy assets. JMI Realty executive Drew Bridges joins the show to break down how his firm is using AI to source acquisition targets off terrible guest feedback. The specific deal: a Hilton Garden Inn in Austin bought for $100K per key that reviewers called "janky" and "a complete nightmare." Drew walks through the renovation math, why he's keeping the brand, and why only 184 of 789 US submarkets have outpaced CPI since 2019 — a stat that underpins his...

Check out Lodgify claim your exclusive discount: https://www.lodgify.com/behind-the-stays/ 

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Explore FerebeeLane: https://www.ferebeelane.com/

Connect with Matt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ferebee-2287566/

Connect with Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharybusekrus/

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Twenty-five years ago, a kid with an English degree and a freelance gig writing about furniture realized something. People didn't want to just know what the sofa looked like. They wanted to know how it was made, who designed it, how many hands had touched it before it reached the showroom. The d...

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Explore Inhaven: https://inhaven.com/

Connect with Ashley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-ching-inhaven-b56a843/

Connect with Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharybusekrus/

Check out Lodgify and get an exclusive discount: https://www.lodgify.com/behind-the-stays/ 

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Here's the question Ashley keeps asking: every other hospitality industry — hotels, airlines, restaurants, car rentals — has a languag...

Airbnb just partnered with TripAdvisor to bring 425,000 experiences onto its platform — a move that signals Brian Chesky isn't just dabbling in experiences anymore, he's building a second business inside the first. The crew breaks down what this means for the future of in-destination travel, why the real unfair advantage might already be sitting inside every host's guidebook, and whether this is Airbnb's best play in markets where short-term rental bans are tightening the grip on its core product. Edwin brings the European perspective: Barcelona's courts just sided with the city, 10,000 units disappear by 2029, and the ripple effects are spreading.   Then the...

Read "Please Do Disturb": https://pleasedodisturbbook.com/

Connect with Rachel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelalday

Connect with Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharybusekrus/

Check out Lodgify and get an exclusive discount: https://www.lodgify.com/behind-the-stays/ 

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In just a moment, you'll meet Rachel Alday, co-founder of Abode Luxury Rentals and author of the forthcoming book, "Please Do Disturb." I brought Rachel back on the podcast because she's an awesome friend of mine, but also because the frameworks and lessons she outlines in her book have guided her and...

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This week we're joined by Sarah Kopit, Editor-in-Chief of Skift — the publication that fuels basically every episode of this show — and she came ready.

We open on the story all of hospitality shared this week: Aman's brand-new, $6,000-a-night Amanvari turning away independent reviewer Ryan Walker at the gate on night...

Connect with Tim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-rosolio-434b2a98/

Connect with Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharybusekrus/

Apply to join the Journey Alliance: http://journey.com/alliance/

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Vrbo just did three things most operators haven't connected yet: it purged 100,000 homes, surveyed 2,000 guests across seven countries, and started rolling out sponsored listings. Put them together and you get the clearest signal yet on where vacation rentals are headed.

Tim Rosolio is VP of Vacation Rental Partnerships at Expedia Group, where he leads the supply and host side of...

Sonder is back — sort of. Eight months after going bankrupt and stranding guests mid-stay, the brand name has been bought by a Vancouver affiliate firm that paid for one thing: search equity. The buildings are gone. The trademarks and 70+ domains remain. And because large language models still route travelers to Sonder’s optimized pages, that name is now targeting $100M in gross booking value over the next year. We get into what it means when a dead brand outlives the company that built it.

Then: Fora’s $1B valuation. The travel advisor platform keeps scaling the human-agent model...

Connect with Glenn: linkedin.com/in/glennhaussman

Explore "No Vacancy": https://novacancynews.com/

Connect with Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharybusekrus/

Apply to join the Journey Alliance: http://journey.com/alliance/

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Meet Glenn Haussman — thirty years in hospitality media, a decade helming No Vacancy News, and one of the most recognized voices this industry has ever produced. He's been in the rooms, on the stages, and behind the microphone longer than most people in this industry have known what a podcast was. He's not just a journalist. He's a mi...

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Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta went on record defending the brand's 28-property portfolio — and the panel has thoughts. Is the multi-brand arms race really about guests, or is it just an elaborate play for developers and distribution? 

Edwin makes the case that independent hotels have a competitive advantage no loyalty alg...

This week, the squad breaks down Norwegian Air's World Cup Instagram stunt that cost next to nothing and generated more brand equity than campaigns with budgets a hundred times the size. Eivind Hammer Myhre, who leads comms and marketing at Norwegian, joins us live to walk through exactly how it happened — the 25-minute brainstorm, the one phone call to get sign-off, and what came after when the whole thing blew up overnight.

Then we get into the Ennismore story. Skift's Rafat Ali floated a thought experiment this week that reads less like an op-ed and more like a...

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James McBride, Co-Founder & CEO of NIHI Hotels, joins the core four for a wide-ranging conversation on what it actually takes to build a legendary independent hospitality brand — from the jungles of Sumba to the halls of the Ritz-Carlton.

James traces his career across some of the most storied names in...

Connect with Colin: linkedin.com/in/colinjamesnagy/

Connect with Zach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharybusekrus/

Apply to join the Journey Alliance: http://journey.com/alliance/

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The luxury hotel boom of the last decade produced more five-star rooms, more high-end brands, and more capital chasing premium travelers than any period in modern hospitality history.

It also produced a lot of hotels that feel exactly the same.

Colin Nagy has spent nearly a decade covering the business of luxury travel for Skift while leading global brand strategy for In...

What if the technology helping independent hotels compete with the biggest brands in the world shouldn’t feel like technology at all?

Cloudbeds serves tens of thousands of properties across more than 150 countries — giving its team a uniquely expansive view into how independent hotels are performing, what operators are struggling with, and how the way travelers discover and book stays is rapidly changing.

In this episode, Zach sits down in person with Rafael Blanes, Chief Growth Officer at Cloudbeds, and Sébastien Leitner, VP of Partnerships, to unpack why they believe this is one of the m...

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Zach, Scott, and Edwin dig into three stories reshaping the industry this holiday week. First: Skift's The Big Squeeze Part 2, which spotlights a family in Iowa who let their Wyndham franchise expire, renovated their Super Eight, and beat their old revenue numbers — no flag required. With 1,200+ economy agreements hitting end-of-term by 2030, the...

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Subscribe to This Week in Hospitality wherever you get you podcasts:

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This week opens in full TWIH chaos: Zach and Scott are somehow a mile apart in San Antonio and still not together, Ben is on the Connecticut shore debuting smarter-looking glasses, and Edwin is back in Barcelona sweating through a muted AC situation.

Then the guys get into the r...

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Two of the biggest casino operators in the world became takeover targets in the same week — and the squad has thoughts.
Barry Diller's People Inc. just offered $18 billion to take MGM Resorts private, days after Fertitta agreed to buy Caesars. MGM's own CFO didn't argue the company was fairly valued — he ar...

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This week opens at LE Miami — which Scott describes less like a travel conference and more like Coachella for hotel nerds — before the guys dive into the real industry tension underneath the party.

Hyatt tells investors to stop counting rooms and start counting fees, arguing that “empty calorie” growth is the wr...