Costa Rica's rainy season forgets to rain, Cambridge second-guesses its own cap, and Longmont gets its first boutique hotel.

• Costa Rica's rainy season forgot to rain. A strengthening El Niño has cut Pacific-coast rainfall as much as 80% below normal since late July — a steeper drop than the last two big El Niño years, 1997 and 2015 — with rice growers skipping planting entirely and ranchers watching pastures shrink. Guanacaste hotels are investing in water storage to keep the dry spell a traveler's upside instead of an operator's headache, which makes this August the clearest, least-rained-on green season anyone can remember.
• Cambridge, Massachusetts wants to cap some hosts at 90 nights a year, and even its own Planning Board can't say why. The board unanimously recommended the City Council's short-term rental overhaul this month but flagged the 90-day limit on "owner-adjacent" units as a placeholder nobody's actually defended — one member said flatly, "I don't really see a need for any cap." A useful reminder that plenty of STR rules on the books started life as somebody's rough guess.
• Guesty just drew the line between "AI-powered" and actually autopilot. Its ReplyAI now reads an early-check-in request, checks your own policy, calculates the fee, and answers the guest without a click of approval — while most tools in this category still hand you a draft to sign off on. The distinction is bigger than it sounds: a stack of drafts waiting on you is still a stack of decisions with your name on it.
• Airbnb just admitted it can't build Experiences alone. Tripadvisor announced this week that a selection of its tours, activities, and attractions will become bookable inside Airbnb later this year — a real reversal for a platform that's spent years trying to grow that business in-house. It's a small line in an otherwise strong earnings week, but worth watching: a company this size choosing to distribute someone else's inventory instead of building more of its own.
• Longmont, Colorado's first boutique hotel opened this month with a rooftop bar named after the general store the block used to hold. Hotel Longmont's 84 rooms sit above Longmont Supply on the fifth floor, with a 1,928-square-foot Golden Ballroom and an executive boardroom for the meetings crowd, and every detail leans on Colorado-artist commissions and local-farm menus instead of a generic boutique playbook. A small city, a full commitment — the same math as the coolest 20-room places, just quieter.

Corporate retreats are a genuine growth line right now — one estimate puts the market near $73.7 billion as more companies fly hybrid teams in to reconnect in person. Most operators still handle a group inquiry by improvising a quote from scratch, which is exactly the moment you lose it to slow follow-up.

Build the one-page version before you need it. Pick one property, or a cluster of two or three near each other, and write down: the flat weekday-block rate for 5-7 nights, the max headcount it comfortably sleeps, and one bundled extra you can say yes to on the spot — a grocery pre-stock, a private chef dinner one night, good coffee waiting on the counter. Save it as a PDF you can attach in sixty seconds.

The next time someone emails asking about bringing "the whole team" somewhere in the shoulder season, you're not scrambling to price a group booking under deadline. You're just hitting send.

Groups traveling together for work rarely unplug at the same moment — someone's always finishing one more Slack thread while everyone else has already drifted to the porch. Give them a shared cue instead of leaving it to chance.

Leave a small handwritten card by the door each evening with two lines only: tonight's exact sunset time, and the one spot on the property to watch it from — the dock, the upper deck, the rock past the tide pools. That's it. It turns "we should probably stop working" into a specific, low-pressure invitation the whole group can act on together, instead of everyone privately deciding to log off at a different hour.

It costs a notecard and thirty seconds a day, and it does something a printed itinerary can't: it gives a group of people who spend all day on calls together one wordless reason to actually be in the same place, looking at the same thing, at the same time.

A short video, podcast episode, or audiobook chapter for the commute, kitchen, or hot tub.

Credit where it's due, and a doorway in if you want to dive deeper on any of the above.

• Costa Rica Faces Months of Drought as El Niño Intensifies, The Tico Times
• Planning Board Supports Short-Term Rental Regulation, With an Asterisk, Cambridge Day
• Your PMS Says It Has AI. So Why Isn't It Moving Faster?, Short Term Rentalz
• Airbnb Partners With Tripadvisor Experiences, Drops Build-Your-Own Strategy, Skift
• The Thrash Group Announces Opening of Hotel Longmont, Lodging Magazine
• Ready to Sell Your Vacation Rental Business? What Buyers Look For and What Happens Next, with Igor Simkin of Monarch Collective, Alex & Annie: Vacation Rental Podcast
• Ohana Vacations — Costa Rica