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1. Global IT Outage Shuts Down Airlines, Other Businesses
A global IT outage has shut down numerous services and businesses, most notably airlines, which were forced to make widescale cancellations and delays, bringing global travel to a screeching halt, the New York Times reports. The outages have been tied to a "flawed security update" from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike that forced restarts on Microsoft systems causing many to crash.
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has publicly apologized for the disruption, and his company has already pushed a fix, but IT experts say the manual nature of the fix could mean that while some systems could be back online immediately, others could take weeks to fix.
The BBC reports in the United Kingdom, airlines and train services are reporting delays and manually processed ticketing. In the U.S., American Airlines, Delta and United have grounded its fleets, and several businesses — including some hotels — have said they have had problems processing payments. Berlin's Brandenburg Airport temporarily halted all flights this morning.
The BBC said the three U.S. airlines issued a “‘global ground stop" on all of their flights. Flights that are currently airborne will continue, but no further flights will take off for now. Major airports across the globe, including in Australia, India, Japan and Hong Kong, have reported major issues stemming from the outage.
2. Hotels Still Coping With 'Holiday Hangover'
The latest CoStar hotel performance data shows year-over-year declines for the week ending July 13 across the U.S., which continues a trend of post-Independence Day slumps, according to STR's Isaac Collazo, Chris Klauda and William Anns.
The analysts said this hearkened back to performance patterns observed before the COVID-19 pandemic and was felt across all chain scales.
One reason for struggles in the hotel industry is an increased interest in alternative accommodations and cruises, and this shift in travel market share is being "compounded by strong outbound international travel."
3. UK Borrowing at Highest Debt Levels Since Early 1960s
The U.K. Office for National Statistics has released new data showing debt levels in the country are reaching their highest point since the early 1960s.
“Public sector net debt, excluding public sector banks, was provisionally estimated at 99.5% of gross domestic product at the end of June 2024," the office reported. "This was 2.8 percentage points more than at the end of June 2023, and remains at levels last seen in the early 1960s.”
A new government elected in the July 4 U.K. general election, and the newly empowered Labour Party, is likely to lay blame with the previous Conservative Party government that ruled since 2010, but it will be under pressure to fix the issue.
Darren Jones, chief secretary to the U.K. Treasury, said, as reported by Morningstar, that the “figures are a clear reminder that this government has inherited the worst economic circumstances since the Second World War, but we're wasting no time to fix it.”
4. No Taxes on Tips Gains Support in US Congress
Ending the requirement to pay taxes on tips in the U.S., where millions of restaurant and hotel employees rely heavily on them for a living, is being put forward as a rallying cry at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, according to the New York Times. The newspaper reports the idea has gained support from both Democratic Party senators in Nevada, which includes Las Vegas.
According to the newspaper, the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said the idea came to him when he was dining at a restaurant in a Las Vegas hotel and his waiter complained to him of the burden of having tips taxed. It added “roughly 4 million Americans work in jobs where tips are common.”
5. Hotel Commercial Team Alignment Still Proving Problematic
Modern hotel firms look for perfect alignment between hotel departments and disciplines, but despite the conversation about silos being a thing of the distant past, getting revenue, sales, marketing and all the other components on the same page and working in the same direction still proves challenging, according to speakers at the 2024 HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference.
Hotel News Now’s Sean McCracken reports that hoteliers state getting those three departments, and others, on the same page requires effort and thought. Chris Hardy, vice president of commercial strategy at Parks Hospitality Group, said part of the challenge in aligning key performance metrics is the systems each team works with still do not communicate well.
"I think the silos have been broken down, but the systems for each discipline have not," he said. "We're still working in an environment where revenue has systems, marketing has their systems and sales has more systems. There's still fragmentation there."