If you spend enough time in real estate investment circles, you’ll hear some version of this claim: destination resorts and experiential hospitality assets hold up better than other real estate in downturns. It sounds intuitive. People still want to celebrate anniversaries. Weddings still happen. Golf still gets played.
The reality is more complicated — and more interesting. The data from the past two major economic cycles tells a nuanced story that is actually more useful to investors than a simple yes-or-no answer. Some destination assets genuinely do outperform in contractions. Others get hit hard. The difference comes down to a few specific structural characteristics that are observable before you invest.
Goat yoga at Renault Winery Resort, Egg Harbor City, New Jersey — owned by the funds offered by Accountable Equity and operated by Vivamee Hospitality. Ticketed vineyard events like this one illustrate how a destination property generates revenue from multiple guest segments simultaneously, independent of overnight room occupancy.
In This Article
1. What the data actually shows about hospitality in recessions
2. Why some destination properties hold up better than others
3. The long-term shift toward experience spending
4. What accredited investors should actually look for
Frequently Asked Questions
What the Data Actually Shows About Hospitality in Recessions
Start with the honest picture. Hospitality as a broad industry does not fare well in recessions, and destination resorts are not automatically sheltered from that.
During the 2008–2009 financial crisis, Smith Travel Research reported a 16.6 percent industry-wide decline in RevPAR — revenue per available room, the key metric the hotel industry uses to measure performance. Gross operating profit fell 19.5 percent. The luxury segment, which includes most destination resort categories, was hit hardest of all, with RevPAR down 23.6 percent. PKF Hospitality Research put the drop in net operating income at 37.4 percent across all hotels.
Meanwhile, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that consumer leisure travel expenditures peaked in 2007 at $1,462 per household, fell to $1,273 by 2009, and had still not fully recovered to their pre-recession level by 2011. The recession was a real demand shock, not a blip.
A 2022 study by CBRE Hotels Research, drawing on their Trends in the Hotel Industry database going back to 1978, found that resort hotels as a category showed the poorest performance among all hotel property types during recession years — with occupancy declines running nearly twice the rate of all hotels combined. That’s a finding that gets left out of a lot of destination real estate marketing materials, and it matters.
It also points to something worth understanding about how hospitality performance is typically measured. Most industry benchmarks — including the CBRE data above — track RevPAR, revenue per available room. For a limited-service hotel where room revenue is nearly the entire business, RevPAR is a reasonable proxy for overall performance. For a destination resort generating income from events, golf, dining, and vineyard experiences alongside room nights, RevPAR captures only part of the picture. The more complete measure is TRevPAR — Total Revenue per Available Room — which includes every dollar the property generates, not just the room rate. Industry analysis puts full-service resort TRevPAR at 1.3 to 2 times RevPAR, meaning that a resort evaluated solely on room revenue may be significantly understating its actual economic output. The CBRE study’s own findings reflect this: the properties it identified as outperforming were those that sustained total revenue even as room occupancy softened — which is TRevPAR resilience, whether the study named it that way or not.
Why this matters for investors
Any investment thesis built on “destination assets are recession-proof” is not supported by the historical data. The more accurate and useful question is: which specific characteristics correlate with relative outperformance within the destination category — and does this particular asset have them? Part of the answer lies in how you measure performance in the first place. An asset evaluated only on RevPAR looks like a room-rate business. An asset evaluated on TRevPAR reveals whether the property is actually generating the diversified revenue that creates resilience.
Why Some Destination Properties Hold Up Better Than Others
Within the broad hospitality contraction, the data does show a consistent relative outperformer: drive-to leisure destinations — properties accessible by car within roughly two to four hours of major metro areas.
CBRE Hotels Research has tracked this pattern going back to 1987 and has consistently found that drive-to leisure destinations outperform central business district hotels in RevPAR growth during recessionary periods. The reason is straightforward. When household budgets tighten, long-distance and air-dependent travel tends to get cut before the weekend trip that’s an easy drive away. Properties that capture that redirected demand are structurally positioned differently than urban business travel hotels.
The 2020 pandemic put this into sharp relief. According to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, domestic leisure travel volume fell 24 percent in 2020, while domestic business travel fell 61 percent. By 2022, domestic leisure travel had fully recovered — running 2 percent above pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Business travel was still 20 percent below. The divergence was not subtle.
Leisure vs. Business Travel: The 2020–2022 Divergence
| Segment | 2020 Decline | Status by 2022 |
|---|---|---|
| Domestic Leisure Travel | -24% | +2% above pre-pandemic levels |
| Domestic Business Travel | -61% | -20% below pre-pandemic levels |
Source: International Trade Administration / U.S. Department of Commerce, 2024.
Urban business travel hotels in markets like San Francisco and New York were still down 56 to 61 percent in RevPAR compared to 2019 as late as 2022, according to CBRE and Kalibri Labs. Many destination leisure properties had already fully recovered and, in some cases, surpassed pre-pandemic performance.
Kent Island Resort, Chester, Maryland — owned by the funds offered by Accountable Equity and operated by Vivamee Hospitality. The aerial view shows the Manor House set within nearly two miles of Thompson Creek waterfront. The farmland between the Manor House and the water is leased for agriculture and also hosts skeet shooting events — additional revenue streams layered on top of the core hospitality operation.
The second differentiator is revenue composition — and the metric that actually measures it.
RevPAR tells you what a property earns from rooms. TRevPAR tells you what a property earns from everything. For a destination resort with contracted weddings booked 12 to 18 months out, golf memberships renewed annually, food and beverage drawing local patrons independent of overnight guests, and vineyard and wine experiences, that distinction is not academic — it is the investment thesis. A property that looks mediocre by RevPAR in a soft occupancy quarter may be performing well by TRevPAR because the non-room revenue held.
Consider two resorts with identical RevPAR of $100. The first earns nearly all of its revenue from rooms. The second earns additional income from dining, wine experiences, and event hosting. The second property’s TRevPAR might be $140 or higher — and in a downturn where transient occupancy softens, the contracted and membership-based revenue streams of the second property continue generating income the first cannot access. On paper they look equivalent. In a recession, they are not.
CBRE Hotels Research documented exactly this dynamic in a 2023 study of resort hotels with diversified ancillary revenue. The same-store sample of properties surpassed their 2018 total revenue in 2022 despite renting 8.2 percent fewer room nights. That is TRevPAR resilience: the property’s total revenue recovered even though its room revenue metric — RevPAR — would have shown ongoing pressure. The non-room revenue compensated for the occupancy shortfall in a way that RevPAR, by definition, cannot capture.
This is central to the investment thesis behind Accountable Equity’s portfolio — built by Josh McCallen, CEO and Co-Founder of both Accountable Equity and Vivamee Hospitality, and Melanie McCallen, Co-Founder of both entities and Chief Experience Officer of Vivamee Hospitality. The properties Vivamee operates are not single-variable assets. Renault Winery Resort generates revenue from hospitality, its vineyard and wine experiences, weddings, and golf. Kent Island Resort draws from waterfront leisure, events, dining, and the farming and recreation activities on its surrounding land. The revenue diversification is intentional, and it is the part of the thesis that the data actually supports.
Accredited investors who want to understand how this is structured in practice can explore how Accountable Equity approaches its fund offerings at accountableequity.com/fund/.
The Long-Term Shift Toward Experience Spending
Beyond the recession data, there’s a longer structural trend that is relevant context for any destination hospitality investment thesis.
McKinsey research tracking U.S. personal-consumption expenditure data found that experience-related spending has grown more than 1.5 times faster than overall consumer spending in recent years — and nearly four times faster than spending on goods. Post-pandemic, McKinsey’s analysis of Bureau of Economic Analysis data found that consumer spending on recreational experiences reached its highest share of discretionary spending since 1960.
Part of what drives this is psychological. Cornell University research found that consumers’ assessments of experiences tend to increase over time after the fact, while their assessments of material purchases tend to decline. Experiences become more meaningful in memory; things just sit in the garage. That behavioral dynamic creates a stickier demand base for destination leisure assets than for purely goods-oriented retail.
The important qualification is that this trend operates at the level of consumer preference, not at the level of any specific destination. A well-located drive-to property with compelling on-site experiences captures this tailwind. A dated resort with a single revenue stream and poor drive-market access does not.
What Accredited Investors Should Actually Look For
The data points to a few specific, observable characteristics that separate destination assets with genuine structural advantages from those that just carry the label. None of these require specialized knowledge to evaluate — they require asking the right questions and reading the answers carefully.
The following questions are offered as general educational context for evaluating destination hospitality investments — not as personalized investment advice. Every investor’s situation is different. Before making any investment decision, consult professionals who understand this asset class: a CPA familiar with real estate syndications for the tax implications, a securities attorney for deal structure and documentation, and your own due diligence on the sponsor’s track record.
- Drive-market population density. How large is the metro population within a two- to four-hour drive? CBRE’s historical data specifically supports drive-to leisure markets as relative outperformers. A waterfront resort between Baltimore and Philadelphia has a structurally different demand profile than a remote property requiring air access.
- TRevPAR, not just RevPAR. Ask specifically for total revenue per available room, not room revenue in isolation. A sponsor presenting only RevPAR data when evaluating a full-service destination resort is either operating a commodity asset or presenting an incomplete picture. The gap between RevPAR and TRevPAR — what full-service resorts generate from dining, events, memberships, and experiential programming on top of room revenue — is where the resilience thesis lives. If a property cannot provide TRevPAR data, ask for a full departmental revenue breakdown and calculate it yourself.
- Historical operating data across at least one prior cycle. Property-level operating statements from 2008–2010 or 2019–2021 tell you more than market-level averages. Market data tells you what the category did; property data tells you what this specific asset did under real conditions.
- Capital structure. Operating performance doesn’t protect investors from financing risk. Floating-rate debt with short maturities can turn a well-run property into a distressed asset quickly. How a property performs under a 15 percent occupancy stress scenario, with its current debt in place, is a critical number to ask for.
- Owner-operator alignment. Who manages the property daily, and how does their compensation relate to investor outcomes? Properties where ownership and management are aligned tend to make better decisions for capital preservation during contractions than arm’s-length arrangements where incentives diverge.
Our earlier post on how to invest in hospitality real estate builds out this framework in more depth. Investors who want to explore the full portfolio of destination assets operated by Vivamee Hospitality can visit vivamee.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
If resort hotels underperform in recessions, why invest in them at all?
Because the category-level data and the asset-level opportunity are two different things. CBRE’s historical study shows that resort hotels as a broad category have underperformed in recessions — but that category includes everything from dated single-revenue-stream properties to diversified destination assets in high-density drive markets. The characteristics that distinguish the outperformers are identifiable and testable. The investment case is for specific assets with specific structural advantages, not for the category in the abstract.
What makes drive-to access such a meaningful factor?
It comes down to how consumers respond when budgets tighten. Long-distance travel tends to get cut before the weekend trip that’s two hours away. Drive-to leisure destinations can capture some of the demand that would otherwise have gone to further-afield destinations, which is why CBRE’s data going back to 1987 consistently shows this segment outperforming CBD hotels during recessionary periods.
Why did leisure travel recover so much faster than business travel after 2020?
Business travel follows corporate earnings and travel budgets, both of which took years to recover. Leisure travel follows individual consumer preference, which — after 18 months of pandemic restrictions — produced a sharp pent-up demand rebound. By 2022, domestic leisure travel was 2 percent above pre-pandemic levels; business travel was still 20 percent below. That divergence reflects a structural difference in demand drivers, not just timing.
Does revenue diversification actually hold up in a deep recession?
The data supports it at a moderate contraction level. CBRE’s 2023 analysis of same-store resort hotels found that properties with diversified ancillary revenue surpassed their 2018 total revenue in 2022 despite 8 percent fewer occupied room nights. In a severe, prolonged contraction affecting consumer discretionary spending broadly, no revenue stream is fully insulated. The diversification reduces sensitivity to any single demand driver — it doesn’t eliminate downside entirely.
Are these investments available to all investors?
Private real estate syndication opportunities of this type are available only to accredited investors as defined by applicable securities laws. Accredited investor qualification is based on income, net worth, or qualifying professional credentials. Investors who are uncertain whether they qualify should review the requirements or consult with a financial professional before proceeding.
UP NEXT IN THIS SERIES
Red Flags When Evaluating a Real Estate Syndication
Understanding what makes destination assets resilient is one side of sponsor evaluation. The other is knowing what warning signs tell you a thesis doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The next post covers the red flags accredited investors should watch for when evaluating any real estate syndication.