LOS ANGELES — With the U.S. hotel industry still making steady progress in its recovery, hoteliers at the first day of the Americas Lodging Investment Summit were in good spirits.

As the first major hospitality investment conference of the year, ALIS helps to take the temperature of the industry at large. While hotel average daily rates are slowing, or normalizing, and everyone waits to see how much inflation will cool and when the Federal Reserve will lower its rates, hoteliers are eager to develop and make deals. They're just waiting for the right conditions to fall into place.

“It’s a shame that given the nature of the industry, the employment base and what it means to all of you, that we don’t do a better job as a country. It isn’t going to be easy to fix.”
— MGM Resorts International President and CEO Bill Hornbuckle, on the “State of the Travel Industry” panel about why it’s so tough for the U.S. to create a unified campaign to make inbound travel simpler. Hornbuckle is chair of the International Trade Administration’s U.S. Travel & Tourism Advisory Board.

Labor continues to be a challenge for hotel companies. Not just because it costs more than it used to, but because it's still hard to attract and retain top talent. Hotel companies can't provide great service without great employees, and while many recognize the need to show employees how much they are valued through increased wages, it's another rising cost on top of rising costs. From discussions I heard today, it sounds like for the most part, drastic wage jumps are done, leaving room for more moderate increases over the years. That still leaves the issues of attraction and retention, something each company is working out on its own.
— Bryan Wroten, senior reporter
@HNN_Bryan

The ALIS conference sets the tone for U.S. hotel industry outlook for the year, and the word I would use for the overall mood after Day One is “good.” There’s no unbridled optimism here, but what we see is a group of industry executives who have seen some stuff and been through some stuff and are setting reasonable expectations for the short term. That short-term period essentially means until the Fed lowers interest rates, which is still projected to happen in the latter half of the year. Without that move, hotel transaction pace is still stalled and will stay that way — it's just a fact of life. Behind the scenes, the economic slowdown here in the U.S. persists, which drags on hotel performance, but likely not that much. The traveling public is resilient and persistent, if there’s one lesson this industry has learned since 2019. It’ll chug along until hopefully that interest rate move turns the capital taps and deals start flowing.
— Stephanie Ricca, editorial director
@HNN_Steph

There’s been a lot of talk about “normalization” in the hotel industry in recent months, and as I talked to hoteliers today to get a sense of just how “normal” things feel these days, the response boiled down to what exactly you think of as normal. As PM Hotel Group President Joseph Bojanowski said during the Lodging Industry Investment Council, it’s not so much normalization as much as stabilization. Things are different than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic, and they will remain different. That’s the new normal. But if the environment is more stable than it has been in recent years, that predictability makes it easier to plan, which obviously is a benefit for the industry. That’s all to say, for good or bad, volatility remains a normal and healthy part of the hotel industry, just hopefully less severe than we’ve seen in recent history.
— Sean McCracken, news Eeditor
@HNN_Sean

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