Hilton President and CEO Chris Nassetta knows the question on everyone’s minds before they even ask.

“The $64,000 question is, when will the hotel industry be back? The real answer is I don’t know,” he said. “My best guess is by 2023, 2024. Both rate and occupancy are probably more like 2024, though room night demand could be sooner than that. And so that’s what we’re planning for.”

Nassetta called that “a reasonable expectation,” though he was quick to point out his personal faith that the pent-up demand for all types of travel may result in an even quicker recovery.

In an exclusive video interview with Hotel News Now, Nassetta talked about what it will take for hoteliers to reach that light at the end of the tunnel, why adaptation and innovation are critical, and how leaning on culture has helped him show up for all the people around the world who need Hilton to succeed.

Click on the video above to hear his take on the recovery timeline.

His first piece of advice for hoteliers? Think further ahead beyond a vaccine.

“We’re close to the road to recovery,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to survive it. … We have to all work really hard together to continue to work with the government to make sure that we’re getting the relief that we need to bridge to the other side of this.”

That other side is when true stimulus begins, he said. Hoteliers must continue to push for tax incentives, infrastructure investment, job creation and all those other forces that ultimately create hotel demand.

“We’ll get past the epicenter of [the health crisis] this spring and summer, and we are going to need to help jump-start travel and jump-start the economy,” he said.

Hilton has 18 brands around the world, and its most recent launch was the upscale Tempo by Hilton in January 2020. At the end of the third quarter of 2020, the company had 989,326 rooms in 6,278 hotels globally. For the nine months ending Sept. 30, 2020, Hilton’s systemwide revenue per available room was $47.74.

Nassetta said the industry has responded “unbelievably well” to the changing-on-a-dime behavior of the relatively few people traveling mid-pandemic while focusing on cleanliness, helping crisis responders, building out extended-stay business and even catering to remote workers with functional spaces.

“Bill Gates famously said … that things change in the short term less than you think they will, and in the long term a lot more than you think they will, and I think that holds true here,” he said.

He touted Hilton and other companies in the industry for fast-tracking technology — from digital keys to hybrid meeting solutions — to facilitate smoother travel.

He said advancements in technology have always been challenged by short-sighted boards of directors arguing "this will be the thing that creates a step-change down in demand."

"It just doesn’t happen,” he said. “The more we digitize, the more the world becomes interconnected, the faster the world moves. And ultimately that creates demand for travel.”

In the below video, Nassetta further discusses accelerating change in the hotel industry and why the digital connections the world has spent so much time making over the past year will accelerate in-person travel and business.

“We have worked really hard to build an incredible culture, and in a time like this, we leaned on it heavily,” Nassetta said. In 2020, the company was ranked No. 1 in Fortune's Best Companies To Work For in the U.S. for the second consecutive year.

Despite the curveball from 2020, Nassetta said he felt confident in his long-term strategy playbook, which he described as “based on a lot of experience.”

“The playbook is pretty intact,” he said, noting it has carried him through many industry and economic crises. “I may add a chapter or two, or rewrite a couple chapters, because this has been different and more extreme, but the basic playbook is what I call my Three Ps: Protect your people, protect the core business and prepare for recovery.”

Watch below for more on Nassetta’s leadership strategy:

Nassetta said keeping the company’s collective chin up and “a steady hand on the wheel,” while ensuring team members can be proud of their work, is his prime leadership goal.

“During this time, we all have this crazy convergence of the stress in your professional life and your personal life colliding, and it’s really hard,” he said. “For leaders, you have to keep your chin up all the time. If you don’t, the ripple effect through your organization can be dramatically impactful in a negative way.”

Videos were recorded on Feb. 4, 2021, by HNN's Stephanie Ricca.

Editor’s note: Chris Nassetta serves on CoStar Group’s board of directors.