Los Angeles County is one of the largest lodging submarkets in the United States. A revitalizing downtown area, one of the nation's largest international airports, a diverse local economy, and a significant entertainment presence have contributed to a strong lodging demand rebound following the recent economic recession. The following article provides an overview of three Los Angeles County lodgi...

The past several decades have seen a growing awareness amongst hoteliers and investors regarding the environmental and social impacts of hotel development and operations – to the extent where sustainability issues have permeated nearly every aspect of the hospitality industry. This has been driven by multiple factors including owners' and operators' desires to reduce operational costs, changing i...

While the U.S. struggles with the downturn of the economy, the country is not realizing its potential to increase jobs and GDP through international tourism – more specifically, Chinese outbound tourism. The demand exists – the booming economy in China has enabled more and more people to travel farther and for longer. The supply exists – the US has great cultural, natural, and commercial resource...

There was plenty of good news for the U.S. lodging industry to celebrate the end of 2011. Room-supply growth continued to drift downward while room demand reached record levels during the year. Room occupancy moved back above 60% and room rates moved back above US$100. While both of these measures still are short of the levels reached in 2007 and 2008, it was encouraging to see the industry stag...

Coming out of lodging industry recessions, we have historically observed fairly significant increases in hotel operating expenses. Since the initial revenue recovery is typically driven by occupancy, variable expenses naturally rise with the increased volume of rooms occupied and guests served. In addition, hotel managers desire to reinstate the services and amenities that were discontinued durin...

The great recession appears to have been harder on hotel spa operations than on hotels themselves. According to a new study released by PKF Consulting USA (PKFC), hotel spas experienced deeper declines in revenues and profits than did hotels, as measured by RevPAR, in 2008 and 2009 and also are taking longer to recover. While the hotel industry began to improve in the second quarter of 2010, hote...

This article discusses why the cost of capital available to developers influences whether they will require subsidies. A strategy to minimize public subsidies involves seeking the most qualified developer who also has the lowest cost of capital. Public-private partnerships can be an effective means to initiate economic development projects. Development types can include a range of properties incl...

Last year the economy remained in "recovery mode," allowing the industry to focus its efforts more on marketing to the travel consumer and less on scaling back budgets for the first time in several years. The convergence of social media, mobile Web and location-based services, increased personalization and relevancy of marketing messages, the continued onslaught by social buying/flash sales sites...

Dear Santa, Do you judge how good we’ve been in absolute or relative terms? If it is the former, hotel performance, both in London and many of the regions, has been strong and steady for most, but not all of the year. If you review the year relative to other industries, I suspect it has been a stellar performance. According to data to the end of October published by STR Global, rooms revenue per ...

In 2009, all segments of the lodging industry struggled. However, the combined impact of the economic recession and the demonizing of corporate meetings, resulted in an even more dramatic fall off in performance for conference centers. Now, as the U.S. lodging industry has turned the corner and proceeded up the recovery slope of the business cycle, the fortunes of U.S. conference centers have imp...