The Modern Hotelier #240: Our Favorite Moments of 2025 & What's Next in 2026 | with David Millili, Steve Carran, & Jon Bumhoffer
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David Millili: Welcome to The Modern Hotelier 2025 year end recap. Steve, where are we filming this from? 
Steve Carran: Yeah, David. Today we're coming to you guys from the Lafayette Hotel and Club in sunny San Diego, California. Beautiful hotel. Second time back this year, and it is incredible.
So now we're gonna go over our 2025 review. Talk about what happened this year. Some of the highlights for me, it was how we almost doubled the amount of episodes. We're closing on 250 episodes. We're gonna do around 120 episodes this year. We became, hospitality is the Most Engaged podcast. We got over three thousand comments on our LinkedIn post alone had over 13,000 reactions and almost doubled our LinkedIn audience, so we top 10,000. Thank you to everybody that has followed along, engaged with us. We appreciate it and it's been a ton of fun. David, what about you?
David Millili: Yeah, and the launch of Modern Hotelier Media has been a great success. Along with Dean, who's been part of the team and us. We've added Eileen to help with the social media side of the business. We've added Joe who's gonna be helping on the production side, and really the hotel experience tours have been incredible. We've been in over five cities, some fantastic hotels, and it's just been a blast filming them.
Jon Bumhoffer: Yeah. And in addition to that, we've done a number of events and trade shows. We started out the year doing biotech in San Diego. Then we did the direct booking summit in Dallas, which was a great event. We handled all the video production and content creation for that, for that event, photo and video. And that was a really fun event for me personally to kind of lead the team and put together a team for. So I'm really proud of that one. And then we did HITEC in Indianapolis and we did a lot of interviews. I don't even couldn't tell you the number, but yeah, all day for multiple days, that was great. And then we did the independent Hotel show in Miami, which was a very cool event. That was my first time going. But I thought that was a really unique event for independent hoteliers, that was a great show. And then we finished the year, our last show as the Hospitality Show in Denver, Colorado which is a great way to end the trade show year for us. So it was great to help hotel tech companies kind of showcase how they help hoteliers and do that at these different events. And I thought, it was just a great year for that type of thing. And we squeezed in an ILC in Chicago.
David Millili: We did an ILC in Chicago's another got, we did fun.
Steve Carran: One of our favorite shows to go to. 
David Millili: Yeah. So what, we'll start with you, Steve, and we'll work it this way. What was a favorite moment of 2025 for you? 
Steve Carran: I gotta say the hotel experience episode's coming to life. A little background for those who don't know, we actually came up with that idea the same day we came up with the podcast back in 2021 and we came up with this idea and kind of just held onto it for a few years and developed the format, kind of developed what these episodes are gonna look like.
And like David said, we've done multiple of these in five different cities. Did our one of our first ones here at the Lafayette Hotel where we are right now. Um, so it is really cool to see these come to life and they're one of my favorite types of episodes to film. Jon, what about you? 
Jon Bumhoffer: My favorite thing was probably, I mentioned it, but the Direct booking Summit, it was a huge event for us. It took a lot of. Effort and just time and attention and to pull something like that off for me, it was just a really proud moment for us 'cause that was one of our first bigger events at, since launching the media company and just to kind of go out and do it and deliver high quality results was something I loved. I loved doing that kind of work. I liked, I'm a kind of nerd on the quality and the, the camera and just making great content and I'm really proud of that one. So that's probably one of my favorite things this year. I mean, for me it's kind of, it all rolled up into one.
David Millili: So we take our remote podcast, we had great guests. All the events you listed, Jon, the hotel experiences that you listed, just the media company in general. The testimonials we've done the trade show booth interviews, the people that we've met. And I think for me it's when we do the hotel experience, it's like become, we become part of that hotel family.
And so for me, being an XGM, I kind of feel like. We become part of the team and then it's kind of like a little sad. We have to like separate and it's like, we've made these friends and now we're onto the next event or podcast or what have you. So Steve, what are you looking forward to in 2026?
Steve Carran: I'm excited to see our continued growth, like you said, we added Eileen to help hoteliers and tech companies and people in hospitality manager social media. I mean, I think that's huge. We just had Dino on from Arlo Hotels talking about how important social media is for hotels by themselves.
So excited for the growth. We added Joe his first trip here in San Diego. He's been a great help. So just continuing not only to add to our team, but also see how the podcast and the media side grows. Jon, what about you? 
Jon Bumhoffer: For me, it is figuring out and the continued growth, but continuing to grow our audience and provide value to like the hoteliers. Like what can we do to keep providing great content, valuable insights, uh, helpful knowledge for them, whether it's the interviews that we're doing, so. You know, taking the interview guests to the next level or different segments that we, we've already started talking about different ideas. I'm not gonna spoil anything right now, but I think there's a couple ideas that we have to kind of do something different, but still share a lot of value that's gonna help people. And I'm excited to keep just kind of pushing that forward and, and. Just keep doing great stuff for that. 
Steve Carran: You're saying we have some exciting stuff coming next year. We're not just gonna stay, keep it the same. 
Jon Bumhoffer: Yeah. I think, we we're always trying, and that for me too is like, like I said, the nerd part of the video and audio is like, I'm always trying to push, push what we're doing quality wise to keep getting better. How can we improve? But also like, not just the quality, pure quality, but like what the content. What is gonna help people, what are people needing help with? And again, like maybe something we can put to you. Like, what do you wanna see from us? Right. Exactly. In the next year 'cause we're all ears. We're always trying to develop different ideas and new ways to help people. So, leave us any comments or anything like that. 
David Millili: Yeah, it makes sense for me, I think. What I love is we talk about followers, growth, things of that nature, and all these new services, for lack of a better term that we've offered. We're gonna be going international next year for the first time ever. So, we're gonna be, you know, dripping some stuff out as far as we go. But we're gonna be in Germany, we're gonna be in Spain. We got an event in Mexico City that we're gonna be running. So, I think for us, this notion of we're expanding, we've already got a good sizable audience of people especially on LinkedIn to follow us internationally, but I think that for me is gonna be a cool part of next year. It's gonna be great. 
Jon Bumhoffer: Yeah. 
David Millili: Alright, well that does it for The Modern Hotelier 2025-year end recap. We would just love to wish you and your families a happy holiday. Thank you so much.