If I want no phone calls, is owning a hotel REIT the same trade as a slice of one hotel?

They aren't the same exposure. The REIT gives you travel demand plus the mood of the stock market on top, and the two don't move together. The single asset LP gives you one property's demand drivers and one sponsor's competence, with your money stuck for the term. If your reason for going in is that your residential holdings all move together, then the REIT is the honest diversifier, because you can actually rebalance it. Land taught me that illiquidity is only worth paying for when it buys you something specific.

RevPAR means revenue per available room, occupancy times average rate, in case anyone else here needed to look it up like I did. Which I think is the thing thicket is really asking about. In a REIT you never see one property's RevPAR, you see a company average across hundreds. In the LP you see the one number that decides whether you get paid.

I run a service crew and we do turnover and grounds work for a couple of lodging properties, so my view is skewed toward the operating end. What I'd say is that the single asset LP puts you behind one general manager. I have watched the same building, same rooms, same rate card, go from full to half empty inside a year on a management change. Nothing in the deck warns you about that. The REIT spreads that risk across a lot of managers, and you'll never know which ones are bad, which is either comforting or not depending on your temperament.

I want income without a second job, and the part of thicket's post I keep stopping on is the fee stack. In the LP there's an acquisition fee, an asset management fee, the hotel management fee, sometimes a franchise services fee, and the preferred return sits behind all of it. A REIT has costs too but they're inside a reported number I can compare against other REITs. I don't have a good way to compare one sponsor's fee load against another's. Voted REIT for that reason alone.

orchard's point about illiquidity is the one to sit with. You should only lock money up when the lock is buying you access to something you can't get on a screen. A single well located hotel with a genuine demand driver might be that. A generic limited service box in an oversupplied interstate market is not, and there's a lot more of the second than the first.

Question I would have been embarrassed to ask: if the REIT is publicly traded, is the price I pay related to the value of the hotels at all? Because it sounds like people buy and sell those shares based on interest rate news and recession headlines. If I'm getting travel demand exposure wrapped in a bunch of macro noise, I'm not sure I got the thing I wanted. juniper's point about never seeing one property's numbers bothers me more the longer I think about it.

compass, share prices and property values do connect, but loosely and with a lag, and the gap between them can stay wide for years. That's the tradeoff you accept for daily liquidity.

thicket, the fund option gets skipped in this thread and I think it's the interesting one. You get several properties, so no single general manager decides your outcome, and you still get to read actual property level reporting instead of a company average. The cost is another fee layer and a term you can't exit. What I'd ask a fund sponsor is how many segments they hold. Extended stay, business transient and leisure destination behave differently in a slow economy, and a fund holding four hotels that all serve the same kind of traveler in the same region is one bet wearing a diversification label.