Isn’t It Time to Redesign Hotel Awards?
Photo Credit: Current version of the Travel + Leisure World's Best Awards Skift
Skift Take
It is surprising that hotel awards are still being given out even when travel is in a lockdown. Some are meaningful and relevant, but mostly it's an industry that begs for a reinvention.
Hotel awards may seem incongruous during the coronavirus crisis when people can't travel but most organizers aren't skipping even a year, saying these recognitions are needed more than ever before.
Last month saw some of the media kicking off the industry's 2020 awards season, including Travel + Leisure's World's Best Awards, Tripadvisor's Travelers' Choice Awards and Agoda's Customer Review Awards.
The hotel categories are always in super abundance and Asia continues to take the cake. Travel + Leisure named the top 100 hotels in the world. Of 4,817 Tripadvisor's awards, 4,292 are hotels, the rest restaurants, airlines, attractions and experiences. Agoda, largely a hotels booking platform, even expanded its awards vastly this year, saluting 30,000 properties from just 7,800 last year. It extended the reach from 22 to 114 markets in Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe.
In a travel lockdown, however, these awards look somewhat out of place. Organizers said votes were taken be
