The next six months may be a rough ride for both the U.S. and international economy, but beyond those storms, relatively smooth sailing may be on the horizon.

Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist of The Economic Outlook Group, laid out his forecast for how the U.S. economy will influence hotel industry recovery at The Lodging Conference this week in Phoenix, calling for “a fairly significant slowdown this fall and winter.”

“There are still great concerns about the delta variant spreading,” he said. “In addition, we don’t seem to see the supply chain bottleneck easing up. Third, energy prices are moving up and that’s going to cut into consumer spending. And finally, there’s a basic scarcity of goods — raw materials, intermediate goods and finished products. That will continue to cause prices to move up.”

These hits affect most major U.S. and international business sectors, but Baumohl said he is optimistic that a more normalized business and economic cycle will characterize most of 2022 and 2023 “if we can simply look just past this winter and fall,” he said.

One big reason for his optimism are vaccination rates slowly rising in the U.S.

Read the full article at HotelNewsNow (part of CoStar)