The Hidden Risks Hotel Owners Never Planned For

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Hotels are facing political pressures they were never built to handle.

In this episode, Sarah Kopit and Seth Borko examine how immigration enforcement, protests, and franchise agreements are forcing hotel owners into impossible decisions.

They also explore why hotel brands have doubled in number but struggle to stand out, and what that means for the future of travel.

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The number of the week is 24. That is the number of brands that the major hotel franchise companies now own on average. That stat is from our latest research report, the new economics of hotel brand expansion, Y scale alone is not enough.

And we’re gonna talk about that a little bit later in the program, but first, some news and a deep dive from me.

We promised you some stuff from Minneapolis, the last week, I kind of teased it a bit, and we published that piece, and we’ll talk about it in a little bit.

First though, another thing we teased last week was the Epstein piece that we were working on here in the newsroom. We hadn’t published it yet, so I didn’t want to, you know, with things like this, like this is how the sausage is made.

The lawyers hadn’t read it yet.

Yeah.

So I didn’t want to talk about it because the lawyers hadn’t blessed it.

But this is kind of a crazy one, right? Because the lawyer, like this is one where you can’t just hit send.

Correct. Correct.

Shows the difference between journalism and tweets, right?

Is that if it comes out of our newsroom, like we are, we’re not just, you know, for a really sensitive subject like this, you know, we’re not afraid to report on these really senior people who are in here.

And yeah, I mean, we’re not necessarily accusing them of wrongdoing, but hey, it’s news, it’s out there. And our lawyers say it’s okay to report it.

Yeah. So, so yeah, so we had the executive chairman of Hyatt, Pritzker, he resigned.

And Barry Stern liked of Starwood Capital. And he said he only, he gave a quote, not to us, but to another publication, basically saying, I don’t know the guy, I only attended one group dinner with him.

Yeah.

We wound up in the emails.

Yeah. And then also Sir Richard Branson, which, you know, he also, the connection was kind of, I mean, he was very tacit. He just, they communicated.

But this whole story, it’s so complicated. You know, we, you and I have talked about this before too. Like, it’s, it doesn’t seem strange.

It’s funny. I can’t even like get my thoughts around it. That, like, so many of the conspiracy theories that have been kind of going on in our, in our lifetimes are kind of like coming true a little bit, you know?

Yeah, I mean, I just, I mean, I read those files, man. I don’t know.

I’ve seen some like very, very funny, like memes on Twitter where it’s like me to my boss, I write in this email, rewrite it a thousand times, like, hello. Oh, can I say hello? I don’t want to say hi, hello or hey, how do I start this email?

And then it’s like rich billionaires, like full of typos, like full of like just one-sentence things.

Party at my place.

Party at my place. Yeah, there’ll be girls come over.

Yeah, I know. I know. So anyway, so it was interesting.

I was telling somebody the other day, they’re like, why do you like working in the travel industry? I’m like, this week alone, like as a journalist, I have reviewed or worked on stories about Epstein, Osempic and ICE.

So, you know, it’s like, it just crosses over into everything.

4:03

Travelʼs Global Impact

So well, it’s gonna sound cheesy, right?

But like, travel is like a fundamental, like, it’s just so fundamental to how business gets done, to how families live, to how leisure happens.

And so it’s like, any story about the business world, any story about the consumer, about the American or the global consumer, probably is going to involve travel at some point.

And the business of travel.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, if it’s a business story, there’s going to be business travel involved. You’re going to have to meet face to face at some point, and there’s going to be some angle.

And you know, these are huge companies, right? Like, I mean, transportation is, it’s really essential infrastructure, which is where, you know, especially for the airlines.

So yeah, I mean, it goes to show with the Epstein stuff that politics, again, this is the moral of the Epstein story, the moral of the Minnesota story that we’re going to talk about is that travel is not insulated from politics, just because it’s

something that you do on vacation, doesn’t, and just because you travel to get away from politics, which many do, doesn’t mean it’s not a part of it. We flagged, we did an Outlook session on our podcast, we did an Outlook LinkedIn Live, there’s

clips, there’s a report. And me and you, Sarah, we flagged the biggest risk of politics and geopolitics.

And before we get to Minnesota, which is itself a geopolitics, politics story, there was another one, the breaking news that just happened about about Mexico, which is also just crazy.

Oh, crazy. I will say I had a summer girls trip, big birthday for my friends and I. We were gonna, the trip was gonna make its way out of the group chat to Mexico this summer.

It got canceled.

Really?

I mean, we’re going, we’re going to go to the Outer Vans. We’re going to go. Yeah, we’re going to North Carolina, but we are not going to Mexico, which is where we were gonna go.

This cartel violence kind of exploded from beneath the surface to front and center.

And it does go to show just how fragile tourism can be. And quite honestly, some of the risks, like if you’re a hotel owner or even a government and you build your economy on tourism, it’s really, really fragile thing.

I think it’s a lesson I’m kind of extrapolating, but I think it’s a lesson that the US has yet to learn because we keep poking and prodding at our tourism industry and we try and see how much resilience there is in there. But in a place like Mexico-

There’s not much learning. There’s not much appetite for learning going on in the United States government at the moment.

Well, this is the sort of thing that I say, is that what’s happened with inbound US tourism is that, you know, when I book a trip to Mexico, I think I’ve even said this on this podcast before, when I book a trip to Mexico and I’m going to Cancun, my

mom will text me, did you see the people who died in Tijuana? And I’m like, mom, that’s five hours away.

But a story like this, and Puerto Vallarta really wound up in the center of this story, shows how even this incident in Puerto Vallarta is going to impact tourism in Cancun, in Mexico City, in all these other tourist destinations.

The US has been immune to that. Oh, there’s something happening in Minneapolis. Isn’t that a long way from New York?

But I actually think one of the things we’re seeing is that increasingly people don’t actually know how far Minneapolis is from New York.

If you’re traveling from London, if you’re traveling from Mexico City, if you’re traveling from Brazil, they increasingly, the US has been immune to that sort of, well, it’s all Mexico kind of logic.

And now it’s increasingly becoming vulnerable to, well, it’s all the US and if it happened in Minnesota, why couldn’t it happen in New York? Which is sort of one of the things your piece explores, right Sarah?

7:37

Minneapolis ICE Incident

Yeah, yeah.

So I went to Minneapolis to kind of take a look at what it was really like on the ground there.

And I will tell you just, you know, for all of you kind of journalism junkies, in my 25 years of doing this, I have never reported on a story where people wouldn’t talk to me. Like they wouldn’t talk to me on the phone.

They would, I would contact them or they would get back to me and be like, oh, I don’t know you. I don’t know you. I’m not going to talk to you.

Or I, you know, I don’t trust. Like there was this, I mean, some of it, I think some of it was the age that we are in with, you know, AI and spoofs and deep fakes and pranks and all of that. I think there’s a certain layer of, you know, distrust.

But I also think people are legitimately scared or were legitimately scared to speak to the press. Usually people love to talk to the press. Really, even if it’s even if it’s not in their own best interest.

I mean, the entire reality TV industry is built on that, you know. But this time, no. So I had to go to Minneapolis so I could talk to people.

So boots on the ground report.

And let’s take a step back. This story, the broader story is this.

ICE, that’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which is the US federal agency tasked with, partially tasked with enforcing immigration laws, has been doing these operations in cities across the country to go into cities, find arrests, detain and

deport illegal immigrants. They did an operation they called Metro Search in Minneapolis. They had to send, they just surged in the name, they just surged a bunch of agents into Minneapolis.

3,000.

They don’t live in, how many?

3,000.

They don’t live in Minneapolis. So where do you stay? If you’re traveling on business and you don’t have a home, where are you going to stay?

So there’s all these ICE officers trying to check into hotels, and that kind of sets the scene. Then what happens next, Sarah, sort of explodes, right?

Yeah. So the thing that really struck me, mostly just watching on Instagram, TikTok, social media, was just how big of a story the hotels were.

I mean, granted, from our vantage point, like you can’t help but see it, but so much of the protesting that was done in Minneapolis, especially in the early days, was what the protesters themselves would call noise protests.

And so they were banging pots and pans, sometimes bringing out full drum kits and people who were in bands. And the whole point was, with speakers, was to make it uninhabitable, or if not uninhabitable, extremely unpleasant, to be inside that hotel.

And you would see it, people would record it, and then they would pan up to the Marriott sign or the Hilton sign. They were very much outside these hotels. And then, so we noticed that, we saw that.

But then came the tweet or the X-post from the Department of Homeland Security, who put really on blast Hilton, Hilton proper, like Hilton worldwide, tagged them and said, one of your hotels, which was a Hampton Inn in Lakeville, suburban

Minneapolis, is not letting our ICE, is refusing to house our ICE agents. And I remember that day, Seth, you and I, like in the group chat here at Skift, we’re like, I bet it’s a franchisee.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

And of course it was. And so there was a, and they lost their franchise agreement within 24 hours. Yeah, so the reaction was incredibly swift.

Yes, right. It was incredibly swift.

Yeah. And so Hilton, which goes to show, and I think it’s fascinating you report this, and it’s actually how you sort of start off your story.

The contract language when a hotel owner decides to sign a franchise agreement with a hotel brand very much gives the hotel brands the rights to terminate.

I mean, literally in a matter of 24 to 48 hours, it’s incredibly complex and expensive business relationship was terminated like that.

Yeah, like that.

And so, I talked to a few franchise lawyers about this, and they told me, they said that they were actually surprised at how quickly this all went down, meaning usually the brands really try to give, to use the legal lingo, the franchisees the

opportunity to cure, which means to fix whatever the problem is. But I guess the whole thesis of the piece is, franchise agreements were never built for this, for this type of political conflict.

So in this case, basically you had the US government, the federal government, the sitting administration attacking a publicly traded company, and they were just like, nope, it’s done. Because they can do that.

Yeah, they can. They have the power. And in this political climate, they’re not going to wait around for a cure.

The new cycle moves too fast. This administration moves too fast and is too vindictive to risk regular processes. Now what I love about the report in the story is, where did you check in to stay, Sarah?

I went to the Lakeville Inn, which is now the former Hampton Inn.

Formerly known as, yeah.

Yeah, the Hampton Inn.

They’ve already rebranded.

They’ve already rebranded.

They are the Lakeville Inn now. But I must say, the hotel, I thought that the hotel, I don’t know what I was expecting when I walked in there. Being a reporter, it is like the best job in the world.

It’s so fun. You get to do all of these things. If you’re a curious person, I know people say journalism is dying and all of that.

But kids, if you’re listening, go be a journalist. We need you more than ever. Anyway, I digress.

I don’t think you do digress, I think.

I thought it might be a sad hotel.

That was my perception of what- Yeah, it was not. It was immaculate.

The guy behind the front desk who I talked to, I remember him talking to you many, many times a day trying to- Have you talked to your boss yet? Let me give you another one of my cards.

He was lovely. He was so polite. So just, he put up with me.

He helped me. I left my AirPods in the hotel room, I had to go back and get them, and he went off and got them for me. All of that kind of stuff.

So it was not a, like they’re keeping that hotel to the same brand standards. I’m sure that it always was when it was a Hampton Inn. In the old Hampton Inn stuff, some of it was still there.

I know that it takes a while too. All the signs were down.

Sort of like a thief. And then the second one, the crime shows, when they show up and they’re like, oh, the stove is still on. I know they were here recently.

It’s like the-

Exactly.

The d-flag and d-franchise equivalent of the stove. The stove was just on as you stayed there.

Yeah. So that was my experience there. I stayed downtown Minneapolis at one of the places where there actually was some destruction where some of the protests got pretty wild.

I talked to the front desk folks there as well. And they said it was scary. They said the damage was gone like the next day.

So it looked perfect to me.

But one of the things that we were talking about is you sort of, we said that the hotel industry wasn’t built for this. That’s the thesis. That’s the headline.

Yeah.

And you talked about how it wasn’t built for the brands who are trying to respond to the federal government.

But one of the things that we talked a lot about was also how the hotel owners sort of wind up in the squeeze between a lot of this, because my question to you might just be, well, OK, the hotel, the federal government is putting a publicly traded

company on blast. Why don’t the hotel owners just allow ICE agents to stay there? Which, I mean, granted, you could take a moral stand.

But what you also discussed in this report and what you found out is that it’s incredibly difficult to operate a hotel if you have ICE agents staying with you, right?

Correct. So that’s the thing. Like, I don’t know this because I didn’t get it.

I didn’t talk to those owners. But I don’t think that when hotels are making these choices, I don’t think they are just moral, like, I’m going to get up on my high horse.

I think these are business decisions that these hotel owners are needing to make. Because it’s almost like you’ve got your hotel owner, right? You’ve got pressure from the brand coming from above.

You’ve got worker protections. And that was the thing that was so… You know, ICE was surging, and a third of the workers in the hotel and hospitality industry are immigrants.

And so it’s the highest percentage of any occupation. And so, you know, I talked to the president of the hospitality union there, and she told me, you know, hundreds and hundreds of workers either requested…

They quit, they requested to be moved, they requested to be transferred, because they were afraid to go to work. And I mean, there was one instance where, you know, a lawsuit was filed. There was a guy who was, I believe, from Nicaragua.

He was here on an asylum application. He had a valid work visa, was working at a hotel. His boss even talked to the ICE agents who were staying at the hotel.

Boss was verbally assured that if this asylum seeker came to work, he would be okay. He comes to work, he gets arrested. Like, that’s what the hotels are dealing with.

He was held for five days, and then a judge ordered him to be released. So you’ve got government, brands, hotels, you know.

And then consumers, if you accept ICE agents, you’re going to have noise protests outside your door. If you decline to host ICE agents, you’re going to have a whole other set of right-leaning people threatening to boycott you.

So these hotel owners…

They’re in a completely no-win situation.

Brands want to take a stand of, we are open to everyone.

But if you get protests from noise protesters, it’s not the brands that have someone show up outside their house, it’s the hotel owners that have someone show up outside their property, which they paid for and is at risk.

If you accept ICE agents, it’s going to be really hard for you to staff. There’s already a labor shortage, already cost pressure. And so, yeah, they’re in this no-win situation.

And then one of the things that we discussed, and we don’t know for sure with this particular property, but as a general rule of thumb, we also, being nerds, or me being a finance nerd, and you being finance nerd adjacent, financing, where does the

money come from? Most people don’t buy hotels or any real estate in cash. What do they do?

They do just what me and you do, which is they take out a mortgage and a lot of people don’t know this, we’re really in the weeds now, that’s our job at Skift, but you get better financing rates and many mortgages have either covenants or legal

language, basically requiring in the US franchisees to be affiliated with a brand or a flag because the banks want to have the confidence that you will be plugged into a national distribution network. They don’t want to lend to you as an independent

small business, they want to lend to you as a part of a nationwide network. And so we don’t know for this what happened to this Lakeville property, but it’s entirely possible that if you get deflagged, that you find yourself in default of your

mortgage. And so now you find yourself having taken a moral stand against ICE, having half the country hate you, have your brand deflag you and now potentially in default of your mortgage. That sucks. That really sucks.

Yeah.

And so the thing that was also very interesting is while I was there, so again, 2026 really is this time of everything everywhere all at once.

So while I was there, there was a hearing in, I think it was the house, where one of the leaders of ICE was asked by the representative who represents the area in New Jersey where the finals of the World Cup are going to be held.

And she asked him, will you say that ICE agents will not be present at the World Cup finals? And he would not say that. And she basically is like, well, people are not going to want to come.

I don’t know what to say. And so that happened. And President Trump, I think just the day before I went to Minneapolis had said they have five additional cities that they are looking at, that they have selected.

He did say that they would want to be invited. When he talked, he talked to NBC News, and he said that they would like to be invited to those cities, which, I mean, who knows?

It makes me think it might not be the sanctuary cities that, you know, it kind of has been in the past.

But anyway, it’s like, so every major hotel market in the country is basically on notice right now that something like that happened in Minneapolis, like Operation Metro Surge, could be coming to them.

And we’re like, we’re coming into the high season, right? You know, the Minnesotans were out there in negative 20 degree weather. The weather’s only getting better for protesting in the United States of America.

That’s true.

And this impacts the brands, the flags, the owners, the staff, it also impacts just the whole market.

I mean, we actually had some data in this piece that showed that after the death of Renee Good, who was the protester killed, shot by ICE officers, room rates fell. Room rates fell like 15% in the Minnesota market, far below what happened to peers.

What’s interesting is that the rates actually were up before and after. Maybe we can’t prove it, but maybe because there were so many federal workers and journalists and activists coming into the markets. But this does damage.

If there are violent clashes, it will probably hurt room rates. And from a brand perspective, it hurts or maybe helps, but it puts people off from brand Minneapolis, right?

Yeah. I talked to Meet Minneapolis, who is the DMO for Minneapolis, and they had a couple of big conventions cancel. And they were just like, of course.

Yes.

It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. How can you hold a convention if that’s happening? Yeah.

They were both youth-focused conventions.

Yeah, you can’t bring a bunch of kids.

Yeah, totally.

No, into a war zone.

I mean, which is kind of crazy. I guess I don’t want to have this someone, I suppose I’m checking my own biases here. This is a bit of like US-centric bias.

But Minneapolis is having the same brand challenges that Porto Vallarta has happened, is what I’m saying. Is that like the same things that are happening in a Mexican city because of the cartels are effectively taking place.

Some of the same challenges and dynamics are in some ways taking place in Minneapolis. In some ways, they’re worse.

I mean, I will say that during my time, I remember I woke up one day and I like was, you know, opened the laptop, looked at the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, I can’t remember.

And I saw a picture and I was like, oh, was that last night in Minneapolis? And it was not. It was last night in Tehran.

No, stop.

That can’t be true.

And it was. That really, that really is like, oh, okay. So that’s why I’m here, ladies and gentlemen, because like that is just the, that is just the upside down, right?

So yeah, so we’re turning this piece into a series. So stay tuned. There’ll be more to come on the, kind of the life of the hotel owner in 2026.

If you are, if you want to be a source, hey, if you like talking to journalists, you know who to call.

Look, this was just such a great piece of journalism. It was a great feature story. The design is beautiful.

If you haven’t checked it already, check it out online. And this is an example of real boots on the ground, old-fashioned, hard-working journalism.

So yeah, this was old-fashioned journalism. This wasn’t a TikTok clip, although I do kind of wish I would have made one, but I didn’t. So yeah, drop me a link.

If you are a hotel owner and you want to talk, drop me a note, sek at skiptalk. So what else should we talk about today, Seth?

25:09

Hotel Brand Growth

Well, we just published some research, which I’d like to talk a little about.

And I think it actually ties in well to this conversation, because we were just talking about this report in on the tension between franchisors and franchisees, brands and owners.

And I think you did focus on many of the challenges that owners face, but it’s not all smooth sailing if you’re a hotel brand either. And they do add, it’s a great business if you can get in.

We just published this new report, we call it, like you teased the top, the new economics of hotel brand expansion. And sort of the core of the question, this is an idea that we’ve teased and talked around on this podcast.

And one of the great things about being a director of research is that when we have an interesting question that we talk on the podcast, I can assign an analyst, say, hey, go dig a little deeper.

And the question was effectively, how many brands is enough? How many brands is too much? So that’s where we got that step.

The average of the majors, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, they have on average 24 brands a piece now. Some of them have more into the 30s. And so we looked into it.

Here’s an interesting step. I think you’ll like this, Sarah. So the six major hotel groups in the US, like the big flags, they started in 2013.

So like another lifetime ago, they had on average 13 brands a piece. Now they have on average 24 brands a piece. So they’ve effectively doubled the amount of brands they have.

The reality is their RevPAR, which is Revenue Per Available Room, it’s like the number one, I mean, it’s not number one, but it’s a very important operating metric hotel, is mostly the same.

You know, like we saw a lot of RevPAR growth after the, I mean, Adjusted For Inflation, yada, yada, yada. But the reality is that it’s kind of, they’ve invested a lot in expanding their brands.

In doing so, they’ve expanded their networks, they’ve expanded the number of hotels in their portfolio, they’ve expanded the number of royalty members they have, they’ve extended their fee revenue, they’ve expanded.

I mean, lots of great things they’ve grown, but RevPAR, actual revenue that they’re able to generate as a premium, which you would expect as a brand you could have, actually hasn’t moved that much.

And so I won’t say it was all for not, that certainly wasn’t all for not, but I think it’s an interesting contradiction between in a world of, I don’t know, it’s just an interesting thing to think about.

And we talked to travelers, we did a survey and we said, what did we say? Do you feel, this is a fun question, do you feel that most hotel brands feel similar to one another? What do you think the responses were, Sarah?

Do you feel that most hotel brands feel similar to one another?

No, I think they think that they’re incredibly distinct.

Really?

Yeah.

We have 50%, nearly half of consumers somewhat agree that many hotel brands really feel similar to one another. And almost 27%, almost a quarter say they strongly agree that hotel brands feel similar to one another.

So collectively, I mean, yeah, everyone, people understand the nuances and the differences, but collectively, like, almost three quarters of American travelers are saying something along the lines of like, a lot of these brands, I know they’re

different, but I don’t feel a huge difference. And one of the things that, yeah, so I think that’s an interesting finding, you know?

Yeah, so essentially, they don’t care. Like, meaning, if one doesn’t feel any different than the other, they might as well stay anywhere.

Yeah, or they might as well stay wherever they get the most points, or the best loyalty, or the best whatever, right? So I think it’s interesting, you know, we’ve seen the industry build brands for the sake of growth.

Basically, brands build, hotel brands at the parent company, hotel franchises are in the business of creating brands, and therefore, in order to grow, they create more brands, which they’ve succeeded in doing.

It grows the overall pool, it grows the overall pie, it grows revenue, it grows loyalty programs, but it doesn’t actually, if you were to think from like a marketing perspective or a brand manager perspective, it doesn’t actually grow the

distinctiveness of your brand. In fact, it might have the opposite effect. And one of the things that, I’ve said this before in the podcast that we’ve been thinking about is, if your brands don’t stand out, how will they be surfaced in a world of AI?

And so that’s one of the big challenges that we have on our mind.

And it’s not a guarantee, but one possible conclusion from our research is that in an AI world, the next competitive phase might reward clarity of brand purpose over comprehensive coverage of all brand types.

So those are some thoughts and takeaways from our report. I mean, obviously read the full report. There’s a lot of great data and charts from there.

And it’s certainly not saying that there’s anything wrong with the brands or anything that they’re in trouble or in danger. It’s more just that consumers don’t hate it, but they don’t find them distinctive. Does that make sense?

It absolutely does.

I don’t even find them terribly distinctive, and I even know about them.

This Lakeville Inn seems so much like a Hampton Inn. I can barely tell the difference.

Exactly.

30:31

Policy Bets

All right. So let us move to some of our fun stuff that we talk about every week. Now, first of all, did we talk about the Supreme Court on this podcast?

Did we talk about the fact that you actually won one?

No, we didn’t. No?

We haven’t done that? Oh, I thought maybe we could just skip right over that. So in my kind of celebration of having many expensive coffees owed to me by Seth, he actually won one.

Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s tariff plan, which then he just kind of went like right around and picked another law and instituted them right back again, at least for 150 days. So Seth, you won that one.

That was your bet. That was my bet that the Supreme Court would strike down the tariffs. I mean, it took them, what, 10, 11 months?

Yeah, it took them 10 or 11 months and it took Donald Trump.

I don’t know, was it even an hour?

He must have known, they must have known the rule was coming out. He must have had that ready to go, right?

Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah. No, that’s what they decided they were going to do if they lost.

It is a little bit of whack-a-mole.

The Supreme Court, he announces tariffs. The whole world reacts to tariffs. The entire business community gets 11, 12 months to respond, change their supply chains, reprice for tariffs.

The Supreme Court strikes it down, and within 15 minutes, he says, well, they struck down, and technically, by the way, the Supreme Court said, this law that Congress passed does not give you the authority to levy these tariffs.

Within 15 minutes, he said, well, there’s another law I can use. Now, we’re in a much better place.

Yeah.

We’re in a much better place because the reciprocal tariffs, some of them were as high as 100 percent. This law wasn’t as overbroad, and so the tariffs are only 15 percent, and they’re only temporary until blah, blah, blah, blah.

So we are in a better place, but it does go to show.

I think like the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah is important. That’s important. That’s like the defining, that’s like the defining part of this entire conversation, is that like, nobody knows, nobody knows.

You can’t yada yada that.

That’s the most important part, Seth.

I paid $77 in tariff on a rug from Pakistan, like four or five months ago. UPS collected it. It was the weirdest thing.

They were like, you got to go to our website and pay this $77 or else like we can’t.

Yeah, we’ll throw it out. Yeah.

So I gave him $70. I want to know if that, as far as I know, like that’s-

Do you get a refund?

Direct.

Are you eligible for a tariff refund?

Am I going to get my $77 back? Well, I know that, I mean, FedEx filed a lawsuit. So I’m sure UPS, and I’m sure the class action lawyers are-

Oh yeah.

They’re looking at their lips over this one.

Warming up their keyboards, like getting ready, trying to find themselves a name plaintiff. But yeah, but I don’t want $3.47 of that $77 back. I want all of it.

I want all $77 that I paid in tariff on my rug.

Well, the lawyers get $70 of it, and you get $7 half of the time you’re done with the class action. Do we need to make another bet for what we want to bet on in the coming weeks? Is there anything exciting in?

Yes.

Do we think that TSA pre-check is actually going to shut down?

I love that one.

Or is it just going to be bluster and talk? Do we think that they’re actually going to pull the trigger on that?

I have an opinion, but do you have a strong opinion? I’m willing to take the other side of your bet if you just want to.

Oh my God. So I’m going to Berlin, to ITB on Saturday, and if I have to go into the regular line at JFK, I don’t know what I’m going to do, Seth. I haven’t had to stand in the regular line in many, many years since TSA Pre-Check arrived on the scene.

So I actually think, yes, they will shut it down because this is how these situations always resolve themselves, airport pain. TSA Pre-Check has never been brought into the fight, but it’s always the airports.

It just strikes me as such a good oomph for the right-wing base of like, we’re going to make those left-coast liberal elitists wait in line with the real America. I think I see it, right? It’s a great point of leverage.

It puts DHS back.

It refocuses the attention from, because ICE is a part, so for those who don’t know the wonderful American government, Department of Homeland Security is the cabinet level, and ICE is a part of that, but so is the Transportation Security

Administration. So it’s a great way to refocus attention on DHS portfolio away from ICE and towards TSA, another beloved institution.

Thanks, TSA. The poor border folks. What a…

It’s a bit of a thankless gig at the moment.

And I heard Global Entry was shut down, right? I have a relative who is traveling, and she said she had to wait online.

I thought it was the processing, but I don’t know.

I heard last night in Newark Airport, Global Entry getting forced onto a single line. Should I put this in our group chat? Should I put this in flagging links?

Maybe we need to add a star.

I don’t know, because the TSA line is for me leaving to Berlin, and the Global Entry is for me coming back.

The thing is, these are the systems are the way it should be. It took us 20 years to get back from 9-11, and it’s really what changed it, the ultimate. All right, I will take…

I think they will shut it down, too, but let me just take the no bet, just in case, because if it does get shut down, at least you will know.

You have the consolation of knowing that I will buy you a third coffee, as you are waiting in line with the rest of America. How about that?

There we go. Yeah, and I joke, but I really do like TSA pre-check, and I really do like Global Entry. I know.

Okay.

I really like the interview we did a while ago with the former chief of communications for TSA. That was such a fun one.

That was great. That was a fun one. And I talked to the, I think it was, I forget his title, but at Global Forum, I talked to the, I believe it was the deputy acting director of the TSA.

Yeah.

He’s great.

That was such a fun interview.

Wasn’t he or his boss on stage at the Global Forum, right? Did we do an interview?

Yeah, I did that one.

This is such a funny thing about governments is that, you’re like, how are they so bad at what they do? How are these lines insane? How did it take 20 years to get this done?

And then you interview the people who run them, and they are just the nicest, hard-working, most diligent people. And I’m just like, what am I missing here?

Now I’m just really going to get in trouble. It’s like what they say about priests.

Politics and religion in one podcast, Sarah? Politics and religion?

It’s like everybody’s priests are bad, except for yours.

Except for yours.

Yeah.

38:09

Weekʼs Highlights

Okay. Winners of the week, I would like to say that I just recently saw, and I mean recently, like two hours ago, that Metallica is going to be at the Sphere in Las Vegas for a residency in October. I may have to go.

My sibling group chat lit up with this. I think we may go. I think we actually may go.

We’re in San Francisco, New York, and Denver, and I think we might meet in Las Vegas.

Live, tourism, musical residencies, the power strikes again. I mean, Metallica is an all-time great, all-time great.

Oh, my God, and I’ve always wanted to, I even went and saw their concert movie about 15 years ago. It was fantastic, by the way.

I know it wasn’t strictly then, but they really also pioneered some of these stadium shows. Their big stadium tours in the 80s were like, they were the Taylor Swift of their era.

In the 1900s.

In the 1900s, in the last century. Have you seen the video of them, I think it’s them, in Moscow? It’s one of the first Western bands to play in Moscow.

That is one of the coolest video.

I’ve watched it enough that it shows up on my feeds, like that and Tom Holland on the Lymphs Challenge.

Oh, yeah. Tom, another classic show.

There are a few things that-

Iconic pop culture moments. I actually know, yeah, I know the Tom Holland one too. That’s a different winner and the losers, I suppose.

So yeah, so I have seen that.

It’s incredible. It would be scary to be in that crowd in Moscow, only because there were so many people all jumping up and down at one time rocking out to Metallica.

Yeah. When you’re off duty, this is a travel podcast, this is a business podcast. It’s okay if you listen to this podcast at work.

But when you’re off duty, when you get home, Google Metallica, Moscow.

And just do it at work.

Enjoy it.

Be a rebel.

Loser of the week, I am going to… Actually, I changed this like three or four times as we were talking at.

I’m going with, speaking of government officials, the BEA, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, another one of these humble but important government institutions. And I’ve spoken with economists there and they are top-notch economists.

They are retiring their travel, tourism, satellite account. The BEA used to have a team of economists that tracked how much travel and tourism contributed to the US economy. They will no longer be publishing that data as of last week.

So I’m the loser. I don’t get access to that anymore.

I didn’t know about that.

I posted that on my LinkedIn.

That’s kind of devastating.

I think so too. Do you want me to do it? Maybe these are two stories.

I should have put this in the edit chat. Maybe these are two little small features I should have written for you, Sarah.

Yeah, we’ll assign them. We’ll get those done for you, Seth. So when is the last one coming out or has it already come out?

It’s already come out.

What happened was they hit the due date, just like an overdue student, the due date for the next one came out and they were late. I said, when’s it coming out? And they said, we regret to inform you, we will not be publishing this satellite account.

Well, left to pour one out for the BEA next time.

All right.

Well, on that note, that is all for this week.

Thank you very much for listening, everybody. We’ll see you back next week.

See you, everyone.

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