Travel's Reopening and Coronavirus Recovery

Blackstone and Starwood Capital blinked, bowing to critics on what they deemed a lowball offer for Extended Stay America.

Increasing the allotments to international worker visa programs like H-2B and J-1 will barely help the hotel labor shortage crisis in vacation markets. Longer-term solutions, like marketing hotel careers early to students, need to be implemented to achieve any real change.

Huazhu's massive one-month jump in revenue should be a giant jolt of optimism for hotel owners in struggling markets. People really do want to travel and book hotel stays once they get the all-clear on health and safety.

Spoon and Seed's owner says tough times pushed him to wear his business hat first, and the chef one second. The result —resilience amid a major tourism downturn, with a reimagined menu and a new staff management model built to face the upcoming summer visitor surge.

The American Hotel & Lodging Association and Unite Here can't do the silent treatment and wish away the dissent of one of the labor union's largest chapters. A disunited front — along with a strong summer travel season — gives Congress an easy way to reject the $20 billion pitch for targeted hotels relief.

New U.S. spending data suggests that some brands, such as Enterprise, Vrbo, and JetBlue, had a better first half of 2021 than their rivals. The travel industry as a whole should be grateful for the U.S. federal stimulus checks to consumers.

Acore's $200 million investment in Graduate Hotels would be a rare transaction in a hotel investment market where owners and potential buyers can't see eye-to-eye on valuations.

A reopening with mainland China would be a lifeboat for Hong Kong's beleaguered tourism industry. Talks seem to be escalating but hopes are kept in check as vaccine hesitancy for now serves as a real bummer for recovery.

Lifestyle hotels come in many forms, with some focused more on the hip and trendy while, others like Hilton see it as an opportunity to scale up more experiential and food-focused properties around the world. Long story short: we still don't have a textbook definition for what a lifestyle hotel actually is.

The relative stability found in the U.S. will help companies in the online travel agency and vacation rental orbit fuel growth for the next few years — but don’t completely write off Asia and Europe. Most major hotel companies see those regions as the way to continue adding thousands of hotels to their portfolios.