HOSPITALITY BRAND

United Airlines  values its loyalty program at $22B, Skift reports.  Opening the secret box to the industry's most valuable assets... its loyalty member audience and point currency. As the travel landscape changes, companies will have to look at ways to leverage their loyalty program members as an addressable audience in new ways without eroding trust. Not since  Air Canada   sold (and then bought back) its loyalty program, have we had such a public view of the revenue-generating power of loyalty. United's program generated 12% of the airline's total revenue in 2019, you bet that number will be much higher in 2020, and they will be looking for ways to continue to grow that number. Important to note that hotel companies have turned to their loyalty programs as for financing as well, by pre-selling points to their credit card partners.  Both Hilton and Marriott have presold close to $1B dollars each.  Will we start valuing travel companies by the size of thei...

STR reports US Hotel occupancy is above 40% for the first time in about 3 months, for the week ending June 13.   For context, it took us 5 weeks to gain 10%pts in occupancy, we broke 30% on the week ending May 9.   The lowest point was back on April 11, where we closed the week at 22%.  In those 5 weeks, the new Covid-19 case count has remained relatively flat; meaning that we have not seen a significant decrease in new COVID cases (7-day average) being reported.   Originally in LinkedIn, join the conversation below:

Weekly US Hotel Demand Update: Week-ending May 20th was the 7th straight week of modest occupancy improvement; at 35%, up from a low of 21% on April 11th. Despite the increase, this is still a 70% RevPAR decline vs last year. April closed out with the worst RevPAR decline ever, down 80% in the US. Driven by declines north of 90% at Upper Upscale & Luxury properties. Top 25 markets continue to be heavily impacted. Finally, on the development front, the pipeline has peaked, with a number of projects on early stages moving to abandoned or postponed. Originally from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andres-orta-travels_us-hotel-performance-results-april-2020-activity-6672148618444701697-FUlL

Last week US hotel occupancy continued to slowly climb up to 32%; and continued to closely follow China's trajectory, albeit 6 weeks behind; China is now at 43%. STR and CBRE both released updates to their FY forecasts. STR expects a drop of nearly 60% in RevPAR for FY 2020, and does not see a return to 2019 levels until late 2024, driven by a drag in ADR. For their part, CBRE's forecast puts 2020 FY RevPAR at -52%, and a return to 2019 levels a year earlier, by 2023. Originally posted on  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andres-orta-travels_us-results-week-ending-may-16-activity-6669700510477533184-Qhxp

Demand update: Continued slow recovery, over 3M more RNs sold in the US vs the prior week, driven by weekend demand at beach drive destinations. RevPAR -74.4% for the week, up from a bottom of -84% for the week of April 11

1M more RNs sold last week than the week before Slow “improvement” with the 3rd week of sub -80% RevPAR performance, led by weekends at beach destinations and overall select-service hotel performance Originally posted on LinkedIn, join the conversation: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andres-orta-travels_us-results-week-ending-may-2-activity-6664597934195175424-Unvl

More and more hotel companies have realized that if I could get free WiFi in a $10 a night guesthouse in Cambodia in 2009, I must be able to get it for free in a hotel 10 or 20 times that price.   All of the major hotel companies have been saying that it has been in the works for quite some time; but “coincidentally” many have begun offering some sort of free WiFi in the past months.    We can’t get too excited yet, in some cases free wifi comes with some restrictions.   According to HotelChatter’s 2014 WiFi report, Marriott, Starwood, Hilton, Hyatt, Intercontinental, and Wyndham did not offer free in-room internet as of the report’s April 2014 publication.   http://www.hotelchatter.com/story/2014/4/22/11951/4765/hotels/The_2014_HotelChatter_WiFi_Report%3A_Who_is_Still_Charging_for_WiFi_and_Why%3F_ WHERE ARE WE NOW? IHG :   You didn’t see this one coming from Intercon, but they were the first to announce in March 2013 that they would ...