All of the European hotel industry — along with other peers, colleagues and friends from across the world — has just returned from the International Hotel Investment Forum in Berlin, and it was a success.
The feeling was definitely one of the industry having returned to normal, which comes with all the usual challenges, just not a pandemic.
I was there along with my Hotel News Now colleagues Stephanie Ricca and Sean McCracken, and we stayed at the compact, cheery and colorful Mercure Berlin Wittenbergplatz, which features large photos of a woman wearing a fascinator on all the bedroom and bathroom walls.
There are comments on this all over the internet if you wish to peruse them.
We wondered who she is.
In the hotel's elevators are moving, computer-generated sequences of fish and hummingbirds.
On the day I arrived, I took a train via Spandau to a small station called Elstel, which is popular due to an adjacent shopping outlets center and an amusement park called Karls Erlebnis-Dorf. The park appears to have a strawberry theme and, according to its publicity, offers “Europe's largest ice-figure exhibition, the K2 adventure roller coaster, the Beerchen-Schleuder, the juicer, the Beerchen scooter and the tractor track,” very little of which makes sense to me.
Being far more boring than bargain- and thrill-seekers, I headed off to the beauty of the Döberitzer Heide Nature Reserve, a vast area of heathland, sandy expanses and gorse bushes that provide homes for Eurasian crane, red-backed shrike, wood lark, hoopoe and cuckoo, among other bird species I saw.
The walk there passes the fenced-in athletes’ village for the 1936 Summer Olympics, the controversial games that were supposed to have been a showcase for German might and muscle at that dark time.
Almost 4,000 competitors from 49 countries were housed there during events, but today it is abandoned and off-limits. One can see glimpses on the pedestrian path that skirts it and crosses a major highway in the direction of the nature reserve.
Not too many fewer people than that attend IHIF.
On the Sunday and Monday, the first day of IHIF, there was a strike by train workers, which absolutely made me feel at home.
My nature fix satisfied, I was ready to dive into IHIF for what was its 25th anniversary and my 10th. 2020 was a break due to the pandemic, as I am sure we all remember only too well.
Highlights included IHG Hotels & Resorts’ Keith Barr giving a keynote session that will be his last as IHG's CEO.
Robin Rossmann, managing director of STR, CoStar’s hotel analytics firm, made a memorable quip during his keynote when talking about which hotel segments might be worth investing in.
Stating he was certainly not providing investment advice, Rossmann said of investment in general, “past performance is no guarantee of future results … unless you support Tottenham Hotspur.”
Friends who are supporters of this English soccer club told me subsequently that the comment was right on the money.
IHIF attendees who have invested in Spurs, as the club is referred, might have been pleased that this year there was one extra coffee bank available and a representative from Nespresso with his own very fancy caffeine-generating machine.
Us HNN-ers have writing to do in the late evening for publication in our pages on the next day, so partying is unfortunately curtailed slightly, but I very much enjoyed going to the Accor-Ennismore bash at the Monkey Bar in the 25Hours Berlin Bikini Hotel.
The French firm’s chairman and CEO Sébastien Bazin clarified comments he made in his keynote that while the U.S. belongs to U.S. hoteliers and China belongs to the Chinese, the rest of the world belongs to “us.”
At the hotel's Monkey Bar overlooking the city zoo, Bazin told partygoers that “us” meant the rest of the world, not just Accor itself.
I have always said the Western hotel industry world needs a large, non-U.S. firm to provide an alternative.
That is not because Americans do not do hospitality spectacularly well; it is because travel has always been about the differences — in culture, flavor, color, sentiment and history.
Who wants a world where everything is the same?
I will not say “vanilla,” as it is my favorite ice-cream flavor by far, although salted caramel is moving up in my preferences.
Everyone from London who flew to Berlin for IHIF flew on British Airways due to the prices of all airfares seemingly skyrocketing amid the cost-of-living crisis. Fares of the low-cost airlines weren't much cheaper, and together with what seemed to be less convenient arrival and departure times, did not make as much sense this year.
All said, it is always good to be at IHIF.
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