Lodging Leaders

{caption}THROWBACK TO 2019: A panel of hotel industry leaders was part of a general session during the 2019 Hunter Hotel Investment Conference at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis. The 2021 conference is set for May 10-12 at the same venue with COVID-19 health-and-safety protocols in place.{/caption}

The Hunter Hotel Investment Conference will be the indus...

{caption}The coronavirus crisis has forced hotels to reexamine their traditional competitive set as nearby properties close or transition to other uses.{/caption}

The coronavirus crisis has altered the business models of many hotels. For that reason, the pandemic also is forcing hotel managers to reconsider their competiti...

{caption}SKEWED OUTCOMES: Many of the hotel rooms that have gone offline because of the coronavirus pandemic are in big-box hotels. For that reason, industry experts say measurements of average daily rate across the industry are skewed and, for the most part, hotels that remain open are managing to hold rate despite low occupancy during the COVID-19 crisis.{/caption}

NextGen in Lodging launches its monthly podcast on Long Live Lodging’s platform by recognizing Women’s History Month.

NextGen in Lodging is an organization founded in 2020 by mid-career hospitality professionals with a goal to connect and share new streams of thought and innovation that will revolutionize the hospitality industry in the post-pandemic era.

This inaugural episode features three self-starters carving unique paths in t...

{caption}POSITION OF LEADERSHIP: Ron Vlasic, center, in November 2012 is flanked by Joseph McInerney, left, then president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, and John Fitzpatrick, president and CEO of the Fitzpatrick Hotel Group during AHLA’s annual event at the Plaza Hotel in New York City when Vlasic was inducted as chairman of the association and Fitzpatrick vice chairman. Today, Vlasic is COO at Hostmark Hospital...

{caption}SPACED OUT: Suzie Hall of The Cornerstone Collection, a consortium of hotel designers and programming experts, is seeing a lot of properties make more use of their outdoor spaces during the coronavirus crisis. The socially distanced outdoor dining concept is at The Residence Inn Scottsdale in Scottsdale, Arizona, which Hall designed. Rethinking how traveling guests as well as local or nearby residents on staycations can u...

{caption}PAY TO STAY: Police in Fife, Washington, on Dec. 30 evict more than 40 people from the local Travelodge one week after Tacoma Housing Now, an advocate for homeless people, on Christmas Eve paid for one night’s stay for the group. Tacoma Housing Now claimed the state’s eviction moratorium prohibited motel owner Shawn Randhawa from forcing the non-paying guests to leave. Although the federal government said eviction bans do...

{caption}Ridgemont Hospitality in Oakland, California, in October sold its 22-unit motel, The Inn at Temescal, to the city which is working with a local consortium of non-profit organizations developing affordable housing for vulnerable populations. The Inn at Temescal is being converted into apartments for military veterans at risk of homelessness. It was one of two hotels the city acquired for $17.5 million as part of its afford...

{caption}Kathleen Bertrand, a jazz vocalist, performs in her hometown of Atlanta. Bertrand is a former executive of the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, where she helped boost Black travel, mentored up-and-coming hospitality and tourism professionals and established diversity programs.{/caption}

Despite the coronavirus pandemic that has c...

Crestline Hotels & Resorts, a third-party management company in Fairfax, Virginia, recently celebrated its first-place position in J.D. Power’s inaugural Third-Party Hotel Management Guest Satisfaction Benchmark. Long Live Lodging features Aaron Olson, senior vice president of operations at Crestline, and Andrea Stokes, who led the benchmark study at J.D. Power. They share best practices hotel managers are implementing to keep ...

Noelle Trent is director of interpretation, collections and education at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The museum is in the historic Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. The venue is hosting the Smithsonian Institution’s The Negro Motorist Green Book exhibition, which tells the history of Black travel in mid-20th-century America. In this report, Long Live Lodg...

Ben Seidel is founder, president and chief executive of Real Hospitality Group, a third-party manager with a portfolio of more than 100 hotels. Like most owners and managers, Seidel and his team view the coronavirus pandemic as the biggest risk facing hotel performance but acknowledge that other threats also loom large. The number and severity of climate-related catastrophes in the U.S. broke a record in 2020. As a result, Seidel h...

Andrew J. Young Jr. became a civil rights activist 65 years ago, starting as a Baptist minister in Georgia. For more than a decade he traveled alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in pursuit of racial equality in America. Young, 88, has a storied career of public service. He served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a U.S. congressman and mayor of Atlanta. In this special report, Young shares his remembrances of hot...

As a former analyst with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fred Washington knows commercial real estate development, if done with the community in mind, can change residents’ quality of life. Washington wants to do the same thing with the six hotels he’s building in Florida. A new hotel investor, Washington recently made history when he signed Choice Hotels International’s first minority-led multi-unit franchise...

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing hoteliers to deploy new technology to run more cost-efficient businesses and to ensure customers that properties are safe by providing such services as contactless check in and mobile key. Long Live Lodging explores how the COVID-19 outbreak has invigorated hotels’ adoption of tech solutions and looks at what types of products owners and operators are investing in during the coronavirus crisis an...

Hotel appraisers and brokers expect distressed assets to come to market as the pandemic recession continues into 2021. Analysts say billions of dollars in private equity are waiting in the wings to acquire hotels underperforming as a result of the coronavirus crisis. But pricing will be different than in previous economic downturns. While a transaction may be distressed, it will not necessarily reflect distress pricing,” said Danie...

Global business travel is a $1.4 trillion industry. The Global Business Travel Association calculates the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 resulted in a loss of $113 billion in business travel spend in hotels, airlines and other sectors of the travel industry. But all is not lost. GBTA, industry analysts and travel management companies see some green shoots of hope for 2021 as the COVID-19 vaccine rolls out and corporations put some of...

Long Live Lodging, an online multimedia news organization that covers the hospitality industry, found itself tossing aside its plans for news coverage late in the first quarter of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. and devastated the hospitality industry. The year turned out to be ground-breaking for Long Live Lodging, which developed the industry’s first live digital conference, and its podcast, Lodging Leaders, whic...

The damage wrought on hotel businesses by the coronavirus pandemic is wide and deep. But the longevity of the pandemic is proving to be truly devastating, especially as the U.S. experiences another surge in the infection rate. In the early days of the crisis, owners, operators and asset managers acted quickly to prevent hotels from closing. Some advisers helped owners weigh the pros and cons of remaining open or temporarily closing...