As the U.S. hotel industry continues on its path to a recovery, critical questions remain for hoteliers.

During the “Boardroom Outlook: Human Capital” session at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit, hotel executives spoke about how they are addressing concerns over demand, international travel and labor.

As more people return to their offices this fall, business travel will begin to rebound, said Heather McCrory, CEO of North and Central America at Accor. It will be a slow process, but everyone is “Zoomed out” and they want to get out and interact with people, she said.

“I really do see it coming back this fall, and it will take a couple of years to get back to normal,” she said.

Most of the hotels McCrory oversees are larger properties that rely on business and group demand, which has lagged behind leisure demand so far in the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. "Bleisure" travel has been helping some as those mixing business and leisure travel tend to stay longer, she said.

The essential business travel that has returned came from those who needed to travel because their competitors were traveling, said Jim Alderman, CEO of the Americas region at Radisson Hotel Group. It also came back among those who needed to travel to see or service their products.

Bleisure travel could help extend the summer travel season, he said.

Leisure travel extended beyond Labor Day last fall, said Sloan Dean, president and CEO of Remington Hotels, but he, like many parents, has kids who will be going back to school full time this fall.

“Incentivizing people to come and work from a hotel and not necessarily work from home is going to be paramount for the next 12 months, because we still don’t have the true business transient travel in the way that drives core midweek occupancy in the top 25 markets,” he said.

Most of Remington’s hotels in the top 25 metropolitical statistical areas had weekend performance in July comparable to July 2019, Dean said.

“What we’re looking for is midweek occupancy,” he said. “That’s the first macro indicator, and we’re still off 30%. In the top 10 markets, we’re off more than that.”

McCrory, who is based in Canada, traveled outside of Canada for the first time in 18 months to attend the ALIS conference. Before the pandemic, she traveled internationally on a weekly basis.

The travel experience was relatively normal minus the COVID-19 tests 72 hours before leaving Canada and then before her return, she said, but she added that it’s surprising that flying between the two countries is allowed, but people still cannot drive back and forth. The upcoming easing on travel restrictions between the U.S. and Canada marks an improvement, she said.

Among the portfolio she oversees, 50% of the hotels are in Canada and 50% are in the U.S., Mexico and other Central American countries. In Canada, the demand remains domestic, which has had a tremendous impact on hotel performance because American travelers stay longer and spend more.

Among Accor’s hotels in the U.S., travel demand is also domestic. That has proven difficult for its hotels in major gateway cities such as San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Boston, she said. Until international travel returns, performance will remain down.

One of her team members was supposed to attend ALIS, but she couldn’t because she was in Italy within 14 days of the conference, McCrory said. Similarly, two Accor team members from France could not enter the country for the conference. Owners from the Middle East can’t come see their properties.

“This really is impacting our business tremendously,” she said. “It’s going to take a long time.”

In March 2020, InterMountain Management chose to keep its corporate and regional staff and continue to pay benefits, owner Dewey Weaver said. At the property level, however, the company had to let go 1,200 of its more than 3,300 employees.

“That was gut wrenching, and I hated doing that,” he said. “In order to survive and given the level of business that we were not enjoying, it was necessary to do that.”

Hiring employees since then has been a challenge, even with the incentives being offered, he said. Retention has also been a problem. In the last month, the company lost six good managers.

“That’s heartbreaking to me when they’ve been with you that long, but the bottom line was they didn’t go to somebody else. They left our industry.”

The industry must help the hotel teams, Weaver said. The general managers have been taking on their management roles, but they’re also working the front desk and cleaning rooms. That amount of work wears on them, and they’ve been doing this for more than a year.

The labor shortage is actually interfering with franchise sales, Alderman said.

“We have owners we can’t get in touch with,” he said. “They’re cleaning their rooms. They’re just too busy, not leaving the properties or they’re going property to property.”

The industry needs to do more to promote hotels as a career opportunity, Alderman said. It’s one of the few career paths where a non-English-speaking housekeeper can become a general manager, he said.

“It’s one of the greatest paths, a non-collegiate path, to white-collar wages that you can have in this country, to work your way up through a hotel,” he said. “It’s a fantastic opportunity and remains one of the hallmarks of our business.”