Throughout the first quarter of 2021, IHG Hotels & Resorts signed nearly one new hotel each work day, said Elie Maalouf, CEO of the Americas at IHG.
In a video interview with Hotel News at the 2021 Americas Lodging Investment Summit, Maalouf said that interest in new IHG deals indicates that investors, travelers and lenders believe in the hotel industry.
The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted the fundamentals of travel, and the industry is still growing back from those interruptions, but the fundamentals haven’t changed, he said.
“The fundamentals of growth in [gross domestic product] around the world, the growth in population, the growth in household income — that eventually leads people to want to explore and to travel for leisure, and leads businesses to want to explore and travel to expand their businesses, domestically and globally,” he said.
Over the two weeks prior to the interview, Maalouf said he had been on 12 to 13 flights to cities including Atlanta, New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The month before, he visited Italy.
Each flight in the U.S. had completely full planes, one or two of which were actually oversold, and the international flights were nearly full, he said. While many passengers were leisure travelers, he could see that based on their clothes and luggage, several were business travelers as well.
Through conversations with corporate customers, IHG has learned many have relaxed their restrictions on employees traveling, so they’re getting back on the road, he said.
“We’re also seeing some advanced group bookings coming back, and meetings and events being planned,” he said. “I think you might see an acceleration of that after Labor Day.”
The hotel industry isn’t completely out of the pandemic, Maalouf said. There will be ups and downs still, but there’s a lot of confidence on the leisure side and recovering confidence on the business travel side.
“I think that the long-term trajectory is in that direction,” he said.
In his travels, Maalouf said he’s been spending time with IHG’s property teams. Most of the hotels stayed open during the pandemic, and almost all of them are open again.
“I try to rotate around some of our brands just to stay in touch with the property to see what’s actually going on versus what we think is going on and what we’re saying in the office,” he said.
The staff are happy to be back in action and have guests coming in and to be the center of business and activity, he said. At the same time, they’re working hard to meet every new guest expectation. They’re also anxious.
“It’s hard to recruit in some markets,” he said. “They’re having to do double duty in some cases. They are really the linchpin of this industry, the bedrock that got us through the pandemic, that’s bringing us forward.”
IHG is doing everything it can to ensure it hires the best people and can deliver on all the standards it has set, he said. It’s giving team members all the resources it can to continue through the recovery.
For more with HNN's conversation with Elie Maalouf, watch the video above.