Tong Yin

The worst pitches assume I cover a topic just because I have published something related to it. I write on hospitality strategy, hotel AI, and post-globalization tourism—so a pitch about a new pet-friendly bed-and-breakfast in a random small town isn't a fit. The best pitches respect the reader I'm writing for: a hotel owner deciding where to place $50M of capital or a sovereign fund modeling a country's tourism ROI. If a pitch can't answer, 'What does this change for that reader?' ', it probably shouldn't be sent."

I would draw an honest distinction: I am an opinion columnist and strategic analyst, not a traditional beat reporter. What I try to do — across Hotel News Resource, HospitalityNet, PhocusWire and my own InsightBridge Global Intelligence platform — is bring the discipline of academic research into industry writing, so that hospitality and tourism executives, sovereign investors, and policy analysts have a place to read arguments that are structured, quantitatively anchored, and bilingual. In that sense, being useful — not being fastest, and not being most contrarian — is the goal. If a piece I publish sits on someone's desk for six months and still helps them read the next market signal correctly, it has done its job.

Every year for about ten years, hospitality trade publications have declared it the "new" travel trend—even though it was already labeled a trend the year before. The hashtag is funny because it embodies the whole industry's habit of announcing a mega-trend that quietly turns out to already be everyone's default behavior. If any hashtag deserves a moratorium, it's that one.