AAHOACON20 Day 2: It’s All About the Data

Source: Hotel Business
By Adam Perkowsky

NATIONAL REPORT—During the virtual AAHOACON20 session “What the Data Says: Before, During, and After the Pandemic,” executives from STR, CBRE and Kalibri Labs discussed the current state of the industry by the numbers, as well as predicted what’s to come in the short- and long-term future.

Hotel Business Editor-in-Chief Christina Trauthwein moderated a panel that included Jamie Lane, senior research director, CBRE; Amanda Hite, president, STR; and Cindy Estis Green, CEO/co-founder, Kalibri Labs.

Trauthwein began the discussion touting the improvement in the July jobs report, where the unemployment rate fell to 10.2% and roughly 1.8 million jobs were added in the U.S., and asking the panelists what it meant to the hotel industry.

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Markets and Chain Scales
The discussion then turned to the performance of different markets and chain scales. Green brought up a change in the mindset of leisure travelers that is a positive for hotel owners.

“Besides everybody knowing that leisure business is growing, a really big difference in this recovery compared to 9/11 or 2009 is that leisure business used to go heavily to the OTAs,” she said. “We’re seeing that it’s now split between brand loyalty member programs and the OTAs, which is a big change. So, from an owner’s point of view, the thing that’s really good news is if that business now, which is about 40% of the demand, is split half and half, half of that business is more than twice as profitable as the third-party business.

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