While in London this month, I couldn't resist hopping on the Eurostar to visit Paris, where I spent four months in Paris in 2009 on a writing sabbatical. Like so many others, I fell in love with the city. But my next sabbatical will take place somewhere with fewer distractions-like an iceberg adrift in the Arctic Ocean.
For a recent presentation, I was asked to provide an outlook for the London. As the current market conditions make it quite difficult to predict 2010 performance, I decided it would be way more fun to look even further into the future—the 2012 Summer Olympics. And whilst I don’t have a crystal ball, we at STR and STR Global do hold historic data on the past four Summer Olympics: 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia; 2000 in Sydney, Australia; 2004 in Athens, Greece; and 2008 in Beijing, China. This gives great insight on how world events like the Olympics affect a hotel market.
The U.S. hotel industry might hit bottom based on some stabilization of demand, but the pinch that property owners and operators have been feeling during the past year won’t ease in the short term. That message from four company presidents who spoke during last week’s Southern Lodging Summit @ Memphis was clear and sobering; however, they did share some optimism that might have been missing had the panel discussion been held at the beginning of the summer travel season rather than near the end of it.
I suppose it should come as no surprise that as we managed to talk ourselves into a recession, we will now go through the process of talking ourselves out of it. There was a time in 3Q ’07 when the media went through a hilarious period of trying to convey that we might be heading for recession without daring to say the word (“Northern Rock gets bank bail out” from the BBC).