Mm.

Like, "I, you know, like I have ideas, I have risk tolerance.

I can just simply, I can do better than, you know, my brand is doing for me." And those people, I think, do very much recognize that, you know, they're like, "Yeah, you get a little bit back.

You get, you know, it's a few points here or there." But really for them it's about control.

It's about controlling their brand.

It's about, like, doing something different.

Like, they don't, they don't, they don't want the brand standards anymore.

So, like, do you see a path to that shifting on the lending side?

Mm.

Like, I, you know, like I have ideas, I have risk tolerance, I can just simply, I can do better than, you know, my brand is doing for me.

And those people, I think, do very much recognize that, you know, they're like, "Yeah, you get a little bit back.

You get, you know, it's a few points here or there." But really for them it's about control.

It's about controlling their brand.

It's about like doing something different.

Like they don't, they don't, they don't want the brand standards anymore.

So, like, do you see a path to that shifting on the lending side?

And when you first started seeing this or hearing this in your channel checks.

Yeah, so it was actually a very organic thing, I think, for me.

It really only started back in January.

So as you know, I'm editor-in-chief at Skipped.

I don't cover hotels.

It's not my beat per se.

But in January 2026, when there was all of the kind of... protesting, outrage, conversation around ICE in Minneapolis specifically, the thing that struck me was just how often hotels were featured in that protest material.

What are the biggest barriers to going it on his own?

Mm-hmm.

And so I wrote a piece called The Squeeze, which I talk basically about f- their, like the pure play fin- financial issues that are, you know, really squeezing them in their margins between, you know, basically increasing costs and the franchise fees from the big brands coming right off the top.

And then in doing that, I heard a lot about hotel owners who were just dropping the brands altogether and going independent, and that was, that was their solution.

That's what they found worked best for them.

The numbers when they did the math, especially as...

You know, there was a big boom, a big, uh, hotel boom in the early aughts, you know, 2000, 2010.

Yeah.

Like, and so, you know, one of the things that Pritesh was telling me was, you know, he, when he, you know, went dark to do improvements and renovations, like, he's like, you know, content is king, right? He did all of it on Instagram.