Avis Budget Group, the car rental company based in Parsippany, New Jersey, reported third-quarter net income of $183 million, or $5.15 per share. That missed Wall Street expectations. Four analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research had expected earnings of $8.47 per share. Revenue came in at $3.44 billion, topping forecasts of $3.43 billion.

Avis Budget Group reported third-quarter 2026 revenue of $3.4 billion, net income of $199 million, and Adjusted EBITDA of $513 million. Revenue per day was $71.54 excluding exchange rate effects, a slight rise on a year earlier and the third straight quarter of growth. Vehicle utilisation reached 74.0%, up 2 points. Americas utilisation hit 74.1%, which chief executive officer Brian Choi called the best in twenty years despite softer travel demand. Per-unit fleet costs rose 4% to $316 per month. Liquidity ended the quarter at $866 million, with a further $2.5 billion of fleet funding capacity. On October 5, the company received $650 million from its settlement with Pentwater Capital Management LP, to be recognised in the fourth quarter. It will also repay the remaining $350 million of its 5.750% Senior Notes due 2027 before year end.

Royal Caribbean out-earned Hilton's whole 2025 in A quarter. Royal Caribbean earned $1.7 billion in one quarter, more than Hilton made in all of 2025. Cruising now out-earns hotels and car rentals by a wide margin. Royal Caribbean just posted another record. Royal Caribbean earned $1.7 billion in Q3 2026, or $6.45 per share, up from $5.74 a year ago. Revenue climbed 9% to $5.6 billion, and the company raised its full-year adjusted earnings guidance to between $17.85 and $17.95 per share. RCCL Management said bookings are up in the mid-teens since the last call, and 2027 sailings are up in the high teens, booked at record rates. Net yields (revenue per passenger cruise day) rose only 0.9%, so most of the growth came from more capacity rather than higher spend per guest. That capacity is spread across three brands many travelers don't realize share a parent. Royal Caribbean International is the big-ship family product, Celebrity Cruises is the premium line, and Silversea is the luxury line. A traveler who would never book Royal might happily book Celebrity, and plenty of Silversea guests have no idea Royal Caribbean owns it. Each serves a distinct market, and all three feed RCCL's results. How cruising stacks up against everyone else. Comparisons are fun, but until I looked at the numbers, I wasn't aware of just how impressively cruise stacks up against even asset-light industries like modern hotel chains. The four big cruise companies with public data available earned about $8.6 billion in net income on roughly $60.8 billion in revenue. That includes Carnival at $2.8 billion, Royal Caribbean at $4.3 billion, Viking at $1.1 billion and Norwegian at $423 million (a GAAP figure; its adjusted net income was Norwegian at $423 million.05 billion). These four operate on a net margin of about 14%. MSC Cruises, the other giant, belongs to the privately held MSC Group and does not publish comparable results. Hotels, comparatively, are less profitable for the most part. Marriott earned $2.6 billion, Hilton earned $1.5 billion, and Hyatt lost $52 million. IHG earned $759 million on $5.2 billion of revenue. The four combined for about $4.8 billion, or a little over half of what the four cruise companies made. Car rental is worse. Avis Budget lost $995 million, including a $518 million impairment on its electric vehicle fleet, and Hertz lost about $747 million, according to the wider-than-expected losses. Together that is a $1.7 billion loss on about $20 billion of revenue. Enterprise Holdings (Enterprise, National, and Alamo) is a private company and does not report results publicly. Airlines are the only group that earns more than cruising in nominal dollars, and only because of their sheer scale. IATA put 2025 global airline net profit at $45 billion on $1.065 trillion of revenue, a 4.2% margin, and cut its 2026 forecast to $23 billion at 2.0%. Simply, four cruise companies earned about 19% of what every airline in the world made combined, on less than 6% of the revenue. Why the margins look so different. Hotel companies like Marriott and Hilton are asset-light, so their revenue includes massive amounts of reimbursed costs and franchise fees, and most of the physical buildings are owned by other entities. A fair comparison would use margin on fees, and I would not suggest these numbers are apples-to-apples. Cruise lines own the ships, the fuel bill and the debt, with Royal Caribbean carrying about $22.4 billion of it, so their profit has to cover a much heavier balance sheet even after accelerated (and substantial) depreciation. Passenger captivity on a ship is unrivaled throughout the travel industry. Travelers pay for the room, the meals, the drinks, the excursions and the Wi-Fi in one transaction, all on a property the cruise line controls. Royal Caribbean says close to half of this year's guests are repeat customers and about 40% belong to its loyalty program. A hotel chain would love to know exactly how much each guest spends in its properties but they don't; cruise lines know it down to the cent. Royal Caribbean's $1.7 billion, Carnival's $1.9 billion and Norwegian's $491 million add up to about $4.1 billion in net income in a single quarter. That roughly matches what Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt earned together in all of 2025. Hilton's own third quarter net income was $536 million, about a third of Royal Caribbean's. That's absolutely incredible, especially when Two caveats belong here. My sample includes only the hotel companies and cruise lines that publish numbers I could confirm, so MSC and plenty of private hotel owners are missing. The fiscal years also do not line up perfectly, because Carnival's year ends in November. But it's also worth noting that Hilton has about 18x the keys that Royal does, owns less of the product itself (and carries fewer costs), and still falls woefully behind Royal. Why this explains the Sandals deal. When I wrote about Royal Caribbean's $3 billion Sandals deal in September, part of the claim was that Royal knows the customer base well (it does) and that it knows the market well (it does) but understanding the power of capturing the total spend for a client trip is the magic. With this much cash coming off the ships, buying 50% of Sandals, expected to close in early 2027, gives Royal Caribbean a stake in the land-based all-inclusive business. The same logic is why I argued that every big hotel brand wants your all-inclusive money. The cruise industry is not trying to beat hotels at hotels; rather it's buying the segment of the hotel business that already works like a cruise. Conclusion. My agency sells both cruises and hotel rooms, and the difference in how the two operators treat the traveler's wallet is all the difference. Cruise companies have figured out how to capture the whole vacation budget on a floating property they control, and the earnings show it. I expect the gap with hotels to widen next year as 2027 bookings convert at record rates, and I expect more hotel companies to copy the model through all-inclusive resorts and bundled pricing. But I was still shocked that Hilton, which owns very few hotels, and is mostly a marketing arm for a far larger footprint, is dwarfed by a cruise line in a single quarter. What do you think?