TThe destination economy is ceasing, in this cycle, to be a hospitality category. It is becoming an infrastructure category — financed at sovereign scale, programmed as media, and measured against the timetables of cities, not seasons.
The next decade will not be won by who announces, but by who can operate at margin across ten-thousand-room ecosystems they did not build alone. The winners will look less like hoteliers and more like the integrated operators of a media studio, an airport, and a city at once.
Volume II, in December 2026, will measure how much of this held — and what the operating cycle revealed that the announcing cycle could not.