Las Vegas is a barometer for the health of the global hospitality industry; with well over 150,000 rooms available every night in some truly gargantuan properties, it crushes most competitors. Not even a pandemic can halt this city’s growth apparently either.
My phone rang as I was driving to the Langham in Pasadena. Coris USA, a travel insurer, had another housecall. Since I was on the freeway, I couldn’t write, so I asked for the address, planning to collect the remaining information from the patient. I hate to be late, so I told the dispatcher I might not arrive for several hours.
Long stays have become one of the biggest trends in hospitality during the last two years. In their Report on Travel & Living, Airbnb mentions the share of long stays (reservations longer than 28 nights) increased from 14% in 2019 to 24% in 2021. Companies like Sonder built their entire post-covid business strategy around extended stays. The Student Hotel has closed a massive €300M funding round to expand its concept, blurring lines between hotel and student accommodation around Europe. And of course, we at Mews have been betting on long stays with our development.
Cleaning his ear, a guest removed the Q-tip and discovered that the cotton tip had disappeared.
Recent conferences and events have shown us that people are desperate to return to 2019, when everything felt like it was going right for the hotel industry. Even the mammoth amount of supply coming into the market didn’t seem like a concern: demand would simply suck it up. It felt like the overdue downturn would never come.
Few actions bring a hotel doctor more pleasure than removing something from a guest’s eye. Patients have kissed my feet in gratitude.
“Under your tongue… under your tongue… close your mouth… don’t bite!” Seeing a thermometer, the guest had unbuttoned his shirt and lifted his arm. Over much of the world, doctors take a temperature in the armpit. It’s often a struggle to make guests understand.
Although 2021 was a somewhat better year than 2020, most people in the tourism industry will not be sad to say adieu to the year that has just ended. We might call the year 2021 a year of hope and despair, a year when we thought we might see an end to the pandemic and a year of false starts. This past year was not an easy year. We saw nations once again shutting their borders, Europe experienced a great deal of internal turmoil due to its being open and then closed to tourism. To add to the frustrations found throughout the tourism industry many nations suffered from supply chain failures, high inflation, and a continued decline in customer service.
A woman began vomiting the morning after Christmas dinner. People blame upset stomachs on their last meal, but mostly these are viral infections. Although miserable, they rarely last long. Doctors enjoy short-lived illnesses because we get the credit when they go away.
In a brief look back at 2021, there was widespread hope that it would be a slow return back to normal as pandemic concerns eased and society reordered itself, but pandemic troubles lingered through the year.
2022 will be a critical year for the Indian hotel sector as it continues its uphill journey on the long road to post-COVID recovery. We expect the strong rebound in domestic leisure demand to continue, as people have embraced the new ‘normal’ of travel in the COVID-world, even if Omicron or other variants that may emerge from time-to-time act as temporary bottlenecks in the sector’s recovery. Similarly, the Indian hotel sector has also learned to adapt quickly, think outside the box and embrace new ideas faster than before - the few upsides of the instability caused by the pandemic in the last two years. We expect India-wide occupancy to reach pre-pandemic levels in 2022, with average rates approaching pre-pandemic levels towards the end of the year.
Who doesn’t love a good book? While you have read one of our many other editorials espousing technology, and its myriad benefits for increasing revenues plus ramping up team productivity, sometimes a great hotel differentiator is a bit more ‘lo-fi’.
“Pick up card! Pick up card!” intoned the computer. This sometime meant a typing mistake, so I re-entered the numbers and heard the same announcement.
Business and city hotels in India have long overlooked the leisure segment, focusing on corporate clients and groups as their bread and butter. However, domestic leisure travelers came to the rescue of these properties when revenue from traditional business models based on corporate travel vanished suddenly owing to the pandemic. Hoteliers soon adopted the saying that “amidst every crisis, lies a great opportunity,” and quickly adapted to capitalize on the demand.
Waiting at the local carwash, my eye ran over a sheet of ads along one wall. Among notices for personal injury lawyers, pest control, acupuncturists, and pizzas was a photo of a smiling young man in a white coat carrying a doctor’s bag. According to the text, a phone call would bring him to your door at a fee less than an emergency room’s. All ads for housecalls deliver this cheerful boast, never mentioning that the average ER visit, as of 2009, cost $1318.
An alarming number of lawsuits alleging fraud, discrimination, harassment, human trafficking, and other misconduct at some of the U.S.’s most well-known hotels and restaurants have made headlines in the past few years. But to anyone who has worked in the hospitality industry, this is not a recent phenomenon.
Amidst a labor shortage, hotels the world over are looking to do more with less, be it digitalizing or automating processes, devising new recruitment strategies, increasing the reward structure to prevent employee, churn, or ramping up team productivity by whatever means necessary. All are good ventures, but instead of only focusing on the ‘staff’ we must also take a sharper look at the ‘manager’.
Patriots boast that American medicine is the best in the world. My view is more nuanced, but let me take their point of view. You’ll be amazed at the dumb things foreign doctors do!
These last two years have not been easy. Tourism professionals have seen tourism industries that just a few years ago were highly successful now needing to fight for their survival. Certainly, world pandemics play a major role in this decline. It would be, however, a mistake to blame all of the industry’s problems solely on the pandemic. Careful observers of the travel and tourism scene were already noting potential problems, from poor customer service to over-tourism just a mere 24 months ago.
Corporate travel has been gathering up steam globally, albeit slowly, as after several months of virtual meetings and video conferencing, in-person meetings are finally making a comeback. According to a recent report by World Travel & Tourism Council, global business travel spending is expected to rise 26% in 2021 and 34% in 2022, bringing it to two-thirds of pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022. This rebound is likely to be led by the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.