36 Super Bowls, Waikīkī's $100M Facelift, and AI Nightmares

August 17, 2026

Aloha !

Before we jump into this week’s issue, we hope everyone made it safely through Tropical Storm Lala, and our thoughts are with those dealing with the cleanup and recovery. We know much of the Hui felt the storm’s impact in one way or another, whether through power outages, road closures, property damage, or managing anxious guests.

Before we dive in, a big mahalo to this month's sponsor, Amadeus. With solutions across the guest journey, Amadeus helps hotels stay visible, capture demand, optimize operations, and deliver exceptional guest experiences through a connected, AI-powered ecosystem.

This issue has me wondering about a few things: whether a $100 million renovation actually lets you raise rates, why a ballroom full of hotel people gets excited about 4.4% growth, and who ends up owning the front door to travel once AI answers the question. We’ve also got some notable industry moves, a tribute to one of Waikīkī’s hotel pioneers, and an entertainment recommendation that may give you nightmares.

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Mahalo for reading, and as always, thank you for being part of the Hui.

Let’s dive in.

Mahalo,

Dan Wacksman
Hawaiʻi Hotel Hui Insider Editor-in-Chief 😄

Renovate, Raise Rates, Repeat? Not So Fast.

Hilton Hawaiian Village is providing some ammunition for anyone trying to convince an owner to renovate. Following the $83 million renovation of the Rainbow Tower, Q2 RevPAR jumped 12%, revenue increased 15% to $116 million, and the resort generated $41 million in EBITDA, the highest in Park Hotels & Resorts’ portfolio. Next up is a roughly $100 million renovation of the Aliʻi Tower.

And just down the road, Ka Laʻi Waikīkī Beach, Hilton’s first LXR property in Hawaiʻi (formerly Trump Waikiki, who thought that was a good idea?), just completed its own $100 million renovation. That one is particularly interesting because Ka Laʻi is a condotel, where pulling off a property-wide renovation across individually owned units adds a whole other layer of fun.

I recently had an interesting conversation with a hotelier about the challenge of selling renovations to ownership. The pitch sounds easy: renovate, raise rates, make more money. Except sometimes you're spending millions just to bring the product back up to the level of its comp set. If you're already achieving comparable ADR with a tired product, explaining that a renovation may protect your rate rather than dramatically increase it can be a tough sell.

HHV's early numbers certainly help the ROI argument. But the bigger question for owners may be: Are you renovating to create a premium, or spending the money necessary to keep the premium you already have?

One GM Two Hotels and More Moves

  • Eric Duff has been named Dual General Manager of AC Hotel Maui Wailea and Residence Inn Maui Wailea, coming over from Hyatt Vacation Club Kāʻanapali Beach Resort. Wailea is familiar territory: he previously spent nearly eight years at Wailea Beach Resort, eventually serving as Resident Manager. Congrats, Eric! BTW, time to update that LinkedIn profile. You’ve earned it. 😉

  • James Guindon has returned to Marriott International as Market Vice President for Hawaiʻi & French Polynesia after more than four years as SVP of Finance & Operations at Highgate. He previously spent nearly 16 years with Starwood/Marriott, much of it in senior finance roles across the region. A familiar face, a bigger role, and an interesting move between two major players. Congrats, James!

  • Catherine Cambra is HVCB’s new Hawaiʻi Island director after serving as Director of Marketing at Fairmont Orchid since 2018. She also previously chaired the Island of Hawaiʻi Visitors Bureau advisory board. Smart hire. She knows the hotels, the community and the county. In a job built around relationships, local knowledge matters. More on HVCB’s team and island chapters.

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After 62 Years, Time for a Refresh?

When my kids were little, I had an annual pass to Sea Life Park. Fast-forward a few decades, and I have one again, this time for my grandchildren (I know, I know… I look way too young 😉). My biggest surprise going back? Nothing had changed. Literally, nothing. It’s still a beautiful and unique place with tremendous potential, but let’s be honest, it’s tired.

So I was excited to see the Hawaiian Council (formerly CNHA) acquire the 62-year-old park, putting it under Native Hawaiian stewardship for the first time. The vision is to expand its focus on Native Hawaiian culture, marine science, and education. Hawaiʻi needs attractions that are compelling for visitors while also meaningful to the community, and Sea Life Park has the opportunity to be both. Kuhio Lewis and the Hawaiian Council have been making some interesting moves lately.

There’s clearly a lot of work and investment ahead. My annual pass just expired, and I wasn’t planning to renew it... but now, who knows? 😉

Fewer and Fewer

We heard about the passing of Hawaiʻi hotel and condotel legend André S. Tatibouet from the Hui before we read it anywhere else. A GM posted a tribute on LinkedIn about coming up through his hotels, and another hotel leader wrote in asking why nobody had published anything yet. “He didn’t invent the condotel,” the note said, “but he seemed to perfect it.”

André, who passed away July 10 at the age of 85, built Aston Hotels & Resorts into one of Hawaiʻi’s largest hotel companies and helped shape Waikīkī and Hawaiʻi hospitality for decades. He was also known as a hands-on hotelier who walked his properties, knew his employees, mentored future industry leaders, and remained a familiar presence in Waikīkī long after selling Aston. Our condolences go out to his family, friends, and the many people in Hawaiʻi hospitality whose careers he touched.

One bit of Aston trivia I didn’t know: the company name came from consultants who combined his initials, AST, with “on,” inspired by two brands he admired, Hilton and Sheraton.

I never had the chance to know André, but I was fortunate to spend time with Dr. Richard Kelley and the Kelley family, founders of Outrigger. André’s passing got me thinking about that generation of Hawaiʻi hoteliers, people who lived here, walked their hotels, knew their employees by name, and made decisions they had to live next to.

What seems to have replaced them, too often, is a fund with a hold period and an asset manager on a Zoom call from somewhere else. As that hotel leader who wrote to us put it, there are fewer and fewer people left from the big growth periods of Hawaiʻi tourism.

With them goes a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge, history, and understanding of what makes this market different.

If you have an André story, send it our way. We’d love to hear it.

They Cheered for 4.4% Growth!

After years of meaning to go, I finally made it to the STR Hotel Data Conference earlier this month.

A ballroom full of people who like numbers. Phones up at every chart, heads down taking notes during a GOP (Gross Operating Profit) margin slide, actual applause for forecast bars. I have been to a lot of hospitality conferences. This is the only one where a chart received applause.

Then the President of STR, Amanda Hite, put up the U.S. forecast, and the room got happy. 2026 RevPAR up 4.4%, occupancy at 63.1%, ADR up 3.1%. Coming off 2025, which finished at negative 0.2%, that is a real turn.

It also has an asterisk shaped like a soccer ball ⚽. STR showed the forecast two ways, full year and full year excluding June and July, and the gap between those bars is the World Cup.

STR analyst Jan Freitag then dug a little deeper. Rates held up in World Cup host markets, occupancy did not, and a lot of what was booked was the week of. He also aimed at FIFA’s claim that the World Cup would be like 104 Super Bowls. The math says otherwise. Based on recent Super Bowl room revenue, 104 of them should have generated about $11.3 billion. The World Cup came in at $3.9 billion.

Call it 36 Super Bowls. Still not too shabby!

Of course, Hawaiʻi hosted zero matches.

And 2027, stripped of soccer and stuck with the comps it created, forecasts out at 2.1%.

Other interesting points:

  • Record revenue, same margin. U.S. GOP margin was 41.0% in 2019 and 40.4% year to date through May. But that is with ADR up 26% since 2020 and record rooms revenue. The best top line in years bought the industry nothing on margin. Worth remembering GOP sits above insurance, taxes, and debt service, so the owner's version of this chart looks worse than the operator's.

  • The national number hides a very wide spread. Luxury RevPAR was up 9.9% through July while economy was down 0.1%. That national average looks very different depending on where you sit.

  • Booking windows keep compressing. Nearly a third of rooms are booked the week of, two-thirds within a month. That is a domestic short-haul curve, not a long-haul island one.

One thing I kept thinking about through all of this: how much of it actually matters to Hawaiʻi? Travel sentiment, the economy, consumer confidence, all important. But does continental U.S. ADR or a World Cup have a direct impact on a resort in Kāʻanapali? Even the international story they told was about Canada and Europe, which tells you very little about a market whose biggest exposure is Japan.

So use the macro for direction and focus on the micro for forecast. RevPAR growth will likely come from rate, not occupancy. Expenses are still the problem. All relevant here too. But the number you budget against, and defend to an asset manager, is the island number, the submarket number, and the segment number.

Good conference. I would go again, and next time I might even clap for results. But the number would need to at least beat inflation. 🤷‍♂️

Note: RevPAR, ADR, GOP, GOPPAR. If the alphabet soup is getting thick, we made a cheat sheet.

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The New Front Door to Travel Is Up for Grabs

For years, the hotel distribution battle was pretty straightforward: direct vs. OTA, with Google happily collecting tolls from everyone. AI is scrambling that model. Phocuswright says 33% of U.S. travelers now use GenAI for trip research, while 44% say they’d book directly inside an AI platform.

Now everyone wants to own that conversation. Google is bringing hotel offers and booking capabilities into AI search, while Amazon is connecting Alexa+ with travel inventory and its massive base of stored payment credentials. Meanwhile, Booking.com says Google’s AI Overviews are already putting pressure on traditional organic search, and even they haven’t cracked the code on consistently showing up in LLMs.

Of course, everyone and their sister now has a GEO/AEO/AI visibility tool and the “secret sauce” to get your hotel recommended by ChatGPT. Don’t believe it. As we’ve discussed before, for now, it’s basically SEO on steroids: great content, accurate and structured hotel information, strong third-party signals, and a consistent story across the web. Tomorrow? Ask me again.

We spent 20 years trying to get travelers to bypass the middlemen and visit our hotel websites. The next challenge may be getting them to visit a website at all.

Related Stories: Google AI Ads, AI Referrals, AI Stats

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This May Give You Nightmares…

It has been a while since I ran an entertainment tip. That was on purpose. I only include one when I actually have something to say, rather than manufacture a recommendation to fill a slot.

Then came a few months of too many flights and more bad movies than I care to remember, until one finally broke the streak: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, from Daniel Roher, the filmmaker who won an Oscar for Navalny. It starts by scaring the crap out of you and then spends the second half trying to tuck you back in.

Roher is about to become a father and spends the film asking a lot of very smart people whether this is a good time to bring a child into the world. It moves in three acts. First, the people who think this AI revolution ends badly (think human extinction). Then, the people who think it saves us. And finally, the ones actually building it, including Sam Altman (ChatGPT), Dario Amodei (Claude), and others.

What struck me was that the builders were oddly somewhere in the middle. They understand the risks, but are still mostly optimistic. They also come across as remarkably relaxed for people discussing a technology their peers just described as an extinction risk.

Nobody in the movie knows how this ends. They just disagree about the odds.

Somewhere over the Pacific, I paused the movie, reconsidered the future of humanity for a minute, and then went back to watching. You know, normal inflight entertainment.

Streaming on Peacock, or you can rent it on Apple TV or Prime. If you’re flying United, it’s currently part of the seatback or BYOD entertainment, which is exactly where I found it, while munching on a stroopwafel.

Fair warning: if you watch it, you may have some weird dreams.

Industry Events

*If you have industry events to share, please email me at [email protected].

Spotlight on Hawai‘i Hospitality Opportunities

*If you happen to have any job openings, let us know. We will be glad to include them in the newsletter, space permitting; send the job link to [email protected].

As always, sharing these raw takes doesn't mean we endorse every perspective. Still, we take pride in offering a cozy corner of the newsletter for open discourse, real-talk observations, and industry therapy.

Aloha & Office Chatter

  • “Just wanted to shoot a congrats; this newsletter has been mentioned countless times in conversations inside and outside my office."

  • “Dan, this is great! Kelly Sanders was my manager at my very first hotel. One of my absolute favorites.”

  • "Another great read!"

  • "Interesting trend developing here. Mahalo for keeping the industry up to date."

The Franchise Family Feud

  • “Marriott followed Hilton fairly quickly, offering rebates for the best properties.”

  • “Who wrote this Marriott?”

    • HHH Note: LOL! We actually covered brand proliferation in all the major hotel companies back in March. We pointed out that brands are growing faster than tribbles (Star Trek reference): Accor: 53, Marriott: 38, Hyatt: 33, Hilton: 28, IHG: 21, Wyndham: 18

  • “But at the end of the day, aren't they all just franchise models? Marriott does the same thing as IHG and Hyatt.”

Timeshare Lore

  • "Timesharing in Hawaiʻi has a special memory from when we sold Royal Aloha Vacation Club from 1979 to 1984... At the time, a one-bedroom cost only $7,500 with $150 maintenance. 17,500 people made an excellent investment. With 40–60% of timeshare consumers buying additional weeks, the acquisition makes total sense."

  • "On behalf of the timeshare industry, mahalo for the coverage!"

Got a burning hot take, a reality check for our commentary, or some old-school hospitality lore to share? Send your unfiltered thoughts over to [email protected] or [email protected].

About Us

Hawaiʻi Hotel Hui was started by hotel industry veteran Dan Wacksman, CEO of Sassato, a Hawaiʻi-based consultancy that combines deep local expertise with a global perspective.

Our team brings decades of experience across operations, marketing, revenue, tech, and finance, all aimed at helping hotels and travel companies make smarter decisions and move faster. Whether you need additional expertise, extra horsepower, or just someone who thinks like you and moves things forward, we’ve got you. From local independents to global brands, we show up with a no-nonsense, results-focused mindset. To be blunt: we get sh*t done.

Recent projects include brand transitions, system selection (PMS, CRS, CMS — all the acronym soup), implementations, project management, feasibility studies, training, audits, and everything in between.

A lot of organizations deal with stretched teams, siloed processes, and messy tech stacks that quietly stall important work. We fix that. Happy to chat if this hits close to home.