Skift Take
Weekend crowds on city streets don’t necessarily translate to sold-out hotels, but the optics threaten the hotel industry’s already long-shot push for targeted economic relief from the federal government.
Airport traffic and hotel performance are occasionally surpassing 2019 levels thanks to leisure traffic. City attractions like museums and parks are packed again with visitors. Restaurant hosts have returned to scoffing at last-minute requests for Saturday night reservations.
U.S. cities are well on their way back from pandemic lows, and that’s a problem for the hotel industry’s major lobbyist group's big-ticket request to Capitol Hill.
While the U.S. heralds the return of people to city streets, the urban rival from the pandemic also threatens the hotel industry’s push for Congress to deliver targeted aid to an industry ravaged by the health crisis.
“It’s a challenge, and there aren’t a lot of elected officials right now encouraging additional spending,” American Hotel & Lodging Association CEO Chip Rogers told Skift in reference to the multiple stimulus packages passed over the last 16 months. “But if you're going to look at the full picture, you can’t just look at tomorrow. You have to also look at yesterday. These businesses are still struggling in many ways.”
Crowded streets on weekends present an optics problem in the AHLA’s push for the Save Hotel Jobs Act, a roughly $20 billion measure meant to assist hotel owners of all sizes still struggling from the pandemic downturn. But the lobbyist group notes things aren’t as hunky dory as recent weekly occupancy and revenue data suggests at the national level.
The AHLA emphasized in a report released
