Savills expects creative deal making to rise across Europe's hotel investment market, according to a new forecast from the advisory firm carried by Hospitality Net.

The projection itself is the story. A major real estate advisor is signaling that straightforward asset sales will no longer carry the volume in European hotel transactions, and that deal structures — sale-and-manback, sale-and-leaseback, franchised forward funding, preferred equity, and hybrid structures — will take a larger share of activity as buyers and sellers work around valuation gaps and financing costs.

For sellers of travel, the signal matters downstream. Hotel transaction structures determine who holds the asset, who operates it, and under which brand and distribution terms it sells rooms. A shift toward structure-heavy deals typically brings more operator-led arrangements, more franchise conversions, and more renegotiated management agreements — all of which change how inventory reaches distribution channels and at what cost.

What does the forecast actually say?

Savills frames the outlook as a forecast, not a measured result. The firm anticipates a rise in creative deal making across the European hotel investment market; it is a projection of transaction behavior, not a reported volume figure. Hospitality Net's item carries the headline forecast without publishing accompanying transaction data, so trade readers should treat the claim as an advisor's market read rather than a filing-backed statistic.

That distinction matters. Advisory forecasts often precede capital-raising or brokerage mandates, and structure-heavy markets reward advisors with structuring fees. The underlying judgment — that European hotel deals will increasingly be built rather than bought — is consistent with how hotel transactions have moved whenever debt has been expensive and buyer and seller price expectations have diverged.

Why structure is displacing the clean asset sale

Creative deal making, in hotel investment parlance, covers any transaction that does not settle as a simple freehold purchase. Common formats include:

• Sale-and-manback, where an investor buys the property and the operator stays on under a management contract.
• Sale-and-leaseback, which converts an operator's owned estate into leased inventory and releases capital.
• Forward funding and forward purchase agreements on branded development pipelines.
• Hybrid and preferred-equity structures that bridge valuation gaps without resetting headline pricing.

Each format carries distribution consequences. When an operator converts from owned to managed or leased, brand standards, channel mix, and commission economics are frequently renegotiated alongside the real estate. Sellers of travel — wholesalers, bedbanks, OTAs, and corporate agencies — feel those changes in parity terms and allotment availability long after the closing.

How should the trade read an advisor forecast?

Interrogate the incentive, then watch the pipeline. Savills makes markets in the transactions it forecasts; a call for more creative deal making is also a pitch for structuring advisory work. The verifiable test will come in published transaction data: the share of European hotel deals executed through non-standard structures, conversion and franchise announcements from the major chains, and operator disclosures on capital release.

What is measured today is the direction of the call, not the outcome. Savills has put its name to the view that Europe's hotel investment market will reward structuring skill over balance-sheet capacity, and that creative arrangements will account for a growing portion of deal flow across the region's markets.

Hospitality Net's distribution of the forecast gives it reach among exactly the operators, investors, and intermediaries who will test it. The next reporting cycle on European hotel transactions will show whether creative structures took share from clean asset sales — and, for the distribution side, whose brand and channel terms moved with them.