Luxury hospitality begins with a signature property, but a well-situated, beautifully designed hotel is only a start. Stellar service, driven by devoted hotel staff, is what makes a great property come alive. As one general manager (GM) of a luxury hotel told us in an interview, “Our facility is our stage, and guests are paying for a performance.”
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday in lopsided fashion that would compel TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the popular video app to non-Chinese owners within six months or see it banned in the United States.
Financial figures from Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, Airbnb and Trip.com Group – four of the largest online travel agencies in the world – show the companies spent a record amount of money to promote their brands and attract customers in 2023, as pent-up demand from the pandemic is still driving spending.
US-based space company Above Space, formerly known as Orbital Assembly, is aiming to launch two space stations with tourist accommodation: Voyager Station and Pioneer Station.
Eurostat data shows that ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the hospitality sector in Europe has seen elevated levels of bankruptcies, culminating in Q2 2023. Compared to other verticals such as the ICT industry, the hospitality sector was especially hard hit by the restrictive policies implemented by governments to tame the spread of the virus.
The Accor the hospitality industry has gotten to know is a rapacious group, habitually on the hunt, stalking its next brand prey.
As the spring travel season approaches, U.S. hotel occupancy is blossoming week over week even as rate growth slows.
With the development of so many fast-moving and potentially overlapping requirements, the challenge of identifying and collating the data required, and applying the necessary materiality judgements on what to disclose, can be daunting.
Gilda Perez-Alvarado surprised some hotel industry vets when she joined Accor last October, becoming its chief strategy officer. She switched from being the Global CEO of hotel broker JLL.
Hotel owners have been on an epic hiring spree. Yet even after clawing back hundreds of thousands of jobs during the past two years, the industry is still light on staff and often struggling to adapt.
French hotel group Accor is in talks with investment vehicle Dubai Holding to fund the roughly €800mn development of two upmarket cruise liners under the Orient Express brand, in the latest example of Middle Eastern investor interest in the luxury travel sector, according to multiple people familiar with discussions.
The research by Morning Consult for the American Hotel and Lodging Association reveals a significant dominance of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) in the U.S. hotel market, controlling 90% of online bookings and receiving over $50 billion annually from hotels. Despite higher customer satisfaction when booking directly with hotels, OTAs, such as Expedia and Booking.com, benefit from aggressive marketing and the fragmented hotel industry.
Booking Holdings, despite surpassing revenue and profit estimates with record-breaking figures and initiating a quarterly dividend, experienced a significant stock decline on Friday. The travel industry, which saw a massive surge in demand post-pandemic, is now grappling with the reality of normalized demand and growth expectations for 2024. Booking Holdings, along with other travel companies like Airbnb and Expedia Group, benefited greatly from increased consumer spending on travel experiences after the lockdowns. However, the company's forecast for 2024 suggests only a modest growth in bookings and revenue, a stark contrast to the previous year's substantial increases. CEO Glenn Fogel emphasized the importance of long-term growth, despite short-term geopolitical challenges and the expected normalization in travel demand. The company's shares took a hit despite the overall positive performance, reflecting investor concerns over the anticipated slowdown in growth.
Technology increasingly permeates products and customer experiences across the hospitality and restaurant industries. That can elevate the experiences, but it can also put assets, customers and reputations at risk. “Since the pandemic, the industry has been focused on automation and streamlining processes in both the back and front of the house to address labor shortages,” said Grant Thornton Hospitality & Restaurants National Managing Partner Alex Rhodes in his 2024 industry outlook. “There are many ways to substitute an online interaction for an employee interaction.” However, lodging, restaurants and gaming companies need to be careful. “Companies need to remain cautious with technology, however, as the industry continues to be vulnerable to cybersecurity issues as demonstrated by high-profile breaches,” Rhodes said. Companies need to protect the technology that is now woven into their products and experiences — without losing the cost savings and flexibility that is often an important reason for adopting the technology.
Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. and Hyatt Hotels Corp. are among a group of hotel chain operators accused of inflating the cost of luxury hotel rooms with help from a price-setting database.
If you’re planning to go into the hospitality industry, the pathway is increasingly going to involve some sort of familiarity with AI. That’s one of the key messages in “Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Robot Applications in Hospitality Businesses,” a new book by hospitality professor Rachel J.C. Fu. In the following Q&A, Fu discusses how the hospitality jobs of the future will rely more and more on technology to provide a pleasant guest experience.
Technological advances, surging investments and the competition for talent are all working toward one thing: In 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) will start to fundamentally change how business gets done. It will impact how companies grow revenue, conduct everyday operations, engage customers and employees, build new business models, and more.
The process of checking into and out of hotels has evolved significantly, particularly in the post-pandemic era. Initially, checking into a hotel involved rigorous sanitization practices by guests, who would clean everything from under beds to remote controls, mindful of germs. Checking for intruders behind curtains before securing the door also became a common precaution.
Hyatt’s luxury lifestyle brand, Andaz, launched a brand awareness campaign in November called Be Like No One’s Watching. The campaign illustrates the many challenges and opportunities that hotel groups face as they market brands in today’s noisy media ecosystem. So Skift checked in to see how it’s been going.
A man is suspended by a harness from a towering tree in the cloud forest of Costa Rica. He twists and contorts his body, moving through the leaves and branches — a new way of interacting with this rich ecosystem.