My Personal Notes on Why Interpretation Is the Most Underrated Tool in Hospitality Right Now

Skift covers the business. Condé Nast covers the aspiration. Nobody is covering what it means for the people building inside it.

I didn’t start Sojourn as a publication.

I started it as a personal newsletter in June 2025. A way to think out loud. To process what I was feeling and seeing in an industry I’d spent two decades inside – the last decade of which working directly with travel and hospitality brands as a brand strategist and creative director.

I wasn’t trying to build a media brand. I was trying to make sense of something on the inside, and the more I wrote, the more I noticed something. The people finding Sojourn weren’t casual readers. They were founders, builders, operators, and leaders in hospitality asking the same questions I was asking, and not finding answers anywhere else.

That’s when I understood what Sojourn actually was.

Not a personal newsletter, not a media brand, something in between and more specific than either: a publication built around a gap none of the existing voices were filling.

Not a gap in coverage, but a gap in interpretation.

What I kept looking for, and couldn’t find, was something that went underneath the reporting and asked the harder question… not what is changing, but what does it mean for the people building inside it. Not what the trend is, but what it breaks, what it creates, and where the advantage forms for founders and operators who understand it early.

That’s what Sojourn became.