There are three usual ways to hold hotel exposure without operating, and each one moves the work somewhere else rather than removing it.
A third-party management agreement is the most common. You own the real estate and hire an operator who runs the hotel for a base fee, often 2 to 4 percent of gross revenue, plus an incentive fee tied to profit. You still own every decision above the operating line: capital expenditure, franchise relationship, debt, and the choice of manager itself. Owners describe this as the least passive form of passive ownership, because the monthly reporting package is long and the questions it raises are real.
A lease structure hands the operating business to a tenant who pays you rent, which does look more like your land holdings. These are uncommon in the US for full-scale hotels, and where they exist the rent often has a percentage-of-revenue component, so your income still moves with travel demand.
The genuinely hands-off versions are securities rather than real estate. Hotel REITs trade publicly and private hospitality funds and syndications pool investor money under a sponsor. What you give up is control, the timing of your exit, and any ability to fix a bad operator. You're buying the sponsor's judgment. Anything sold as a security has its own rules about who can invest, and that's a conversation for a licensed professional.
The thing worth carrying out of this: hotels reprice every night, so no ownership wrapper makes the income behave like a ground lease. Your land sits there through a recession. Room revenue does not, and the fixed costs of keeping a hotel open don't drop with occupancy.
