In the aftermath of the ongoing pandemic, brand signings by keys in India witnessed a year-on-year decline of 42% in 2020. Signings were especially low in the first half of the year, due to the uncertain market conditions and challenges related to closing deals on virtual platforms because of the COVID-19 lockdown and restrictions.
Hotel transactions value in India contracted by approximately 50% to reach INR24,611 million (approx. US$332 million) in 2020 compared to INR49,372 million (approx. US$690 million) in 2019, but was still higher than the previous peak of INR19,929 million achieved in 2015.Going into 2020, mergers & acquisitions (M&A) activity in the sector was expected to be stronger than that witnessed in 2019.
My hometown is St Andrews, New Brunswick in eastern Canada. The town overlooks Passamaquoddy Bay and to the south we are flanked by the great state of Maine. Every year in this part of the world the US governors and the Canadian provincial premiers get together for bilateral talks, some good food, and fun. This story is about one of those meetings, The Algonquin Hotel, and how I met our then Premier, Richard Hatfield who is partially responsible for my hotel career.
The once-in-a-century pandemic has caused hoteliers to endure a firestorm that decimated the hotel and leisure industries.
We are all trying to find silver linings from this now nearly year-long unimaginable situation that has somewhat stopped us in our tracks. We find comfort and sanity in things like spending more time with our families, picking up new or dormant hobbies, appreciating and improving our homes, keeping up with goings on around us, and so many others. The one you don't hear too much, if at all, is how much better my business is operating.
Q1 of 2021 is not going to be profitable, fun or exciting for us in the hotel industry. The goods news is Q2 will come up quickly and having been through six recessions in hospitality, all the signs of a recovery are finally here. Given the significant impact of the virus on our economic, physical and mental health, I am offering a few sentences of my personal plan to recovery; we'll dive into the following areas below:
This post will tell you about financial leadership in the hospitality industry. It is a summation of information from her research thesis at the Hotel Management School of Maastricht in The Netherlands. The aim of this research is to provide hoteliers with tools to improve their hotel's financial performance with effective financial leadership.
Hotel finance lawyer: PACE Financing is now mainstream
Romain Semmel is Investment Director at Pygmalion Capital. He built the foundation of his career with globally recognised property advisory firm Jones Lang LaSalle, where Romain has been involved in over EUR €2.5billion in hotel acquisition and financing deals across Europe. He joined Pygmalion in 2018, a dedicated European investment firm deploying institutional capital to acquire hospitality assets and operating platforms. The company has had its first foray into the hotel sector by acquiring a portfolio of Spanish upscale hotels and is now looking to continue its acquisitions despite the current environment.
The COVID-19 crisis consumed the United States for approximately three-quarters of the past year. In December 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.[1] The development and distribution of an effective COVID-19 vaccine, alongside other public health measures, should allow us to combat the health effects of the global pandemic. With certainty coalescing around the health solutions to the pandemic, attention must turn to economic solutions.
After making several representations to the government, the Indian hospitality sector, one of the worst-hit by the pandemic, was expecting some game-changing announcements during the Budget 2021 speech which would help accelerate the sector's recovery.However, the first ever 'digital' budget of the country failed to provide any direct and immediate support to the sector.
Cayuga Hospitality Consultants don't always agree, but when asked to predict the future of hospitality, everyone felt the same: Don't expect recovery to be quick.
This quotation is usually attributed to former US President Dwight Eisenhower. He meant it in a military context. When the wolves at the door are soldiers (or even heavily armed and bizarrely-dressed "Republicans"), your plan may have to change rapidly and radically, but you must have one, and you must be clear about where your plan is taking you. This means strategy.
I am a big fan of the Uniformed System of Accounts for the Lodging Industry (USALI), or as she is affectionately called "You Sally." It has been the guide that our industry uses to properly present financial information for a long…long time, in fact almost 100 years. It lays out the format for our financial statement presentation and essentially acts as a referee if you like, to tell us what goes where. What revenues, costs of goods, expenses, and payroll belong to which department.
We have a new PPP Loan authorization bill out of Washington, after months of political wrangling. Congress could have done more, but they did provide for up to $2,000,000 in additional forgivable loans per borrower, along with provisions which specifically cater to the hospitality industry.
A crisis is often needed to make drastic changes and the ongoing pandemic is one of the most challenging crises that the world has faced since the Second World War. The COVID-19 outbreak came in suddenly, swept across the world and changed us in an unprecedented way - not only our businesses but even the way we live.
It is obvious that hotel operating performance will be much better in 2021 than 2020. It is, perhaps, less obvious that hotel lending has already begun staging a comeback that will accelerate throughout the year while continuing to stay ahead of actual hotel performance.
Like many people, I returned to my desk this week after the now-familiar five-second commute between the kitchen and my office at home and pondered what the New Year is likely to bring the UK hotel industry. By the time Boris Johnson started his TV broadcast at 8pm on Monday and Lockdown 3.0 had now commenced, any optimism we might have had was substantially depleted.
Is COVID-19 the Armageddon for the hotel industry? That's the first question I asked Dr. Donald W. Wise, co-founder and senior managing director of Turnbull Capital Group. With over 36 years of investment banking experience in the hospitality industry, he and this firm have been involved in roughly $20 billions of advisory, consultation, note sales, preferred equity and debt placements, and transactional engagements on both the buy-side and the sell-side.
As you know the front office is the command post for your operation, and it's also the point where all the receipts come through. Making sure you have solid internal controls at the desk is not only good business, it's mission-critical. Without these safeguards you are wide open and as someone once said, good internal controls help keep honest people honest. Now don't get me wrong. I believe we need to trust the people we have on our teams, and I also have seen what can happen when there is an opportunity. So, this piece is about eliminating most of those weaknesses at the front desk.