It's Thursday, August 20th.

Welcome to Market Foolery.

I'm Chris Hill with me today.

Mr. Bill Barker.

Good to see you, sir.

Good to be here.

We've got stock buybacks. We have got some retail earnings. We're going to start

with the hospitality industry. Two stories really in some ways at opposite ends of the hospitality spectrum.

We've got reports of a potential merger between two hotel operators overseas,

a core which is based in France, and intercontinental hotels based in England.

Although IHG owns hotel brands like Crown Plaza and Holiday Inn.

Neither of the stocks are really moving a whole lot on this news, but this would be

interesting to see play out in part because I think this would create

the largest hotel company in the world in terms of properties.

It might, and they're hotel operators rather than sort of owners for the most part of

hotel so they're they're both reasonably asset light businesses if they were more in the business of owning hotels themselves,

rather than providing management services, I think they'd both be in a lot more trouble as stocks today because that's a lot of

near empty properties in a lot of cases and so they're you know hoping that they get their management

service bills paid on time by all those hotels who are owned by other companies but you know they're the ones who create the

brands or have acquired the brands over the years they've got a lot of

different brands both of these companies many of which you would know.

But the sense that the merger makes is a core

...