Hurricanes have become boilerplate in risk disclosure.

Hospitality companies tend to bundle climate repair costs and damage with other capex projects. Host Hotels & Resorts’ 2025 end-of-year filing, however, puts a price tag on the damage hurricanes Helene and Milton caused when they hit The Don CeSar in 2024: an estimated $105 million, 30% of which related to remediation.

Host spent $75 million — roughly 11.6% of its overall capex — on hurricane and other restoration work in 2025, including in restoring the Florida St. Pete Beach hotel. 

It had received $73 million in insurance payouts related to the hurricanes at the time of the filing, reflecting lost business too. The Don CeSar was closed until late March 2025, with all amenities reopening by the third-quarter of the year. 

Host spent around 8% of capex on making its properties more resilient to climate risks over the six years to December 2025. It replaced and restored exterior walls, doors and windows, roofs, grounds; relocated and elevated critical equipment; and invested in distributed energy systems. 

Those investments proved successful for Host’s The Ritz-Carlton in Naples when two hurricanes hit in 2024, per the filing. But the company recognizes that “no assurances can be made” for the future. 

Host did not immediately respond to Skift’s request for comment. 

The Atlantic is unusually quiet as the hurricane season reaches its peak on Thursday. The Pacific, on the other hand, has faced a bevy of alerts. 

Hawaiian, Alaska, American and United have all issued waivers amid Hurricane Lowell, a Category 3 event skirting Hawaii. 

A sold-out marathon on Kauai, an island in Hawaii, was cancelled to free up resources and aid community preparedness for the storm. Water and food bought for the event instead landed at the Grand Hyatt, where they were given out to the community.

NOAA’s National Hurricane Center current alert for Hurricane Lowell notes risk of damaging winds, heavy rainfall and powerful waves. It is one of a handful of tropical storms this past week: Karina graduated to a post-tropical storm over the weekend; Marie brought high ocean waves and flooding in southern California; and Edouard weakened into a Tropical Depression as it moved over Texas.

How Storms And Climate Change Interact 

“We don’t necessarily expect to see more tropical cyclones because of climate change, but the chance of those storms intensifying faster and becoming stronger is likely to increase,” Phil Klotzbach, a scientist at Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science, told me.

That’s because stronger storms tend to evolve over warmer water. There are a range of other factors critical for storms reaching high intensities, Klotzbach says: temperatures higher up in the atmosphere; the changes in wind speed and direction with height in the atmosphere, which is known as vertical wind shear; and atmospheric moisture.

A super El Niño cycle is also brewing, bringing above-average water and sea surface temperatures and increasing the risk of extreme weather events. El Niño is the warming phase of the naturally-occuring El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern. How climate change affects El Niño is an active area of research. 

While “warming ocean temperatures load the dice towards stronger and faster intensifying storms,” Klotzbach points out that vertical wind shear, which slices through hurricanes, is at “record high levels” in the western and central tropical Atlantic — “which is the main reason why the season has been so quiet so far” and will likely remain so.

“We always emphasize that even in what appears likely to be a very quiet season, it just takes one hurricane making landfall near you to make it a busy season,” Klotzbach added.

Check out my full reporting over at Skift, and, as ever, feel free to say hi at [email protected].