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1. Waikiki Resort Hotel To Sell for $108 Million
South Korea-based Hanjin Kal Corp. is set to sell off its Waikiki Resort Hotel to U.S. company AHI-CLG for 146.6 billion won ($108.4 million), the Korea Economic Daily reports. The deal is expected to close Friday.
Hanjin will sell all real estate and related assets of the hotel, excluding cash and cash equivalents, in an effort to secure liquidity as its 104 billion won worth of debts mature this year.
Recent assets the company has sold off include a Seoul-based office tower to Korean Air Lines for 264.2 billion won in August.
2. Thousands of Jobs Vacant at Las Vegas Hotels
Nearly 6,000 hotel and hospitality-adjacent roles remain vacant across Las Vegas, and employees still have the upper hand, reports Las Vegas' local news station 8 News Now.
One challenge is that hiring is not keeping pace with the addition of new hotels, including the Fontainebleau debuting in December and the Rocks Lounge at the Red Rock Casino & Spa debuting in November.
“For every six workers, we got 10 jobs out there open,” Stephen Miller, director of research for UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research, told the news outlet in a June 2023 interview. “The basic one: pay them more. But benefits, a more pleasant work environment — all those things count now more than they did before.”
3. Maximizing Business Travel Demand
Hotel sales managers have had to get "really scrappy" in their pursuit of demand from business travelers, which is slowly recovering to pre-pandemic levels, reports Hotel News Now's Sean McCracken.
"They had to go after business they've never targeted before or just business that came into their market. And if you didn't want to take it and it wasn't the right fit, you could turn it away," Erica Lipscomb, senior vice president of revenue strategy for Crescent Hotels & Resorts, said during a panel at the recent Hotel Data Conference.
4. US Inflation Rises in August
New U.S. Labor Department data shows the August consumer-price index rose 0.6% from July as gasoline prices spiked, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Excluding food and energy, prices increased 0.3%.
"While slowing price increases across several categories earlier in the summer were a sign that the Fed has made progress in cooling inflation, the central bank is like a football team trying to punch in a score after a long drive," said Stephen Juneau, senior U.S. economist at Bank of America.
5. Tourist Throng Raises Concerns at Mt. Fuji
Mt. Fuji's popular hiking station Gogome is experiencing hordes of tourists in what officials say feels "like Disneyland," CNN reports.
The number of visitors to Gogome, the mountain's fifth hiking station, has more than doubled from 2 million in 2012 to more than 5 million in 2019, data from the Yamanashi prefectural government shows.
“Overtourism — and all the subsequent consequences like rubbish, rising CO2 emissions and reckless hikers — is the biggest problem facing Mount Fuji,” Masatake Izumi, a Yamanashi prefectural government official, told the news outlet.