As the new year kicks off in earnest, hoteliers are broadly looking to make predictions for 2025.
With that in mind, Hotel News Now connected with a variety of industry experts to get their predictions, expectations for trends and a broad outlook on the big happenings for the year.
Here are some of the highlights from recent Hotel News Now podcasts.
Hotel News Now
Concord Hospitality is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and President and CEO Mark Laport said the Raleigh, North Carolina-based company has managed to grow from a single hotel to 150 one property at a time.
"There was very much an incremental growth strategy," he said. "The good news is our earliest years were successful in a small way, and we simply built upon that. I like to say ours is a success of incrementality. One step at a time. No big portfolio acquisitions, but very much masters of what we like to call the one-off."
The historic Waldorf Astoria New York is slated to reopen this spring after an eight-year renovation, and Managing Director Luigi Romaniello believes guests and New Yorkers will be wowed by the results.
"The whole thing about it is it's not really a renovation. It's a complete restoration-slash-transformation, if you will, because it returns all the scale and the beauty of the original architecture," he said.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, South Korea is struggling through a period of political turmoil, but STR's Jesper Palmqvist doesn't believe it will be detrimental to the country's desirability as a travel destination.
"Korea, this year and particularly the last six months, has been riding off that positive wave where things have been OK, where domestic travel in Korea has been good," he said. "The few Japanese that travel outside Japan ... they've been going to Korea, and obviously a lot of Chinese have been going to Korea."
Heading into the new year, the broad travel industry is awash in buzzwords and travel predictions, which the HNN podcast sought to sort through with Hertelier founder Emily Goldfischer.
Goldfischer dove into the trend of "me-moons" and the rise in solo women travelers.
"Women are three times more likely than men to spend on luxury goods, which underscores the increasing economic clout of women, particularly in the luxury market," she said.
A big trend for the hotel industry in 2025 could be a greater availability of financing, but Peachtree Group's Greg Friedman said the environment will still favor those who are more creative in finding capital. He said this is because a lot of the traditional lenders are still lagging compared to the pre-pandemic period.
"The regional banks, the community banks, the national banks that used to make up 50% of the hotel lending market ... are still not able to lend at the same levels that they once could," he said.
The Upgrade
On HNN's Europe, Middle East and Africa focused podcast The Upgrade, HNN's Terence Baker checked in with design experts from Studio Moren about the power of new and fresh hotel design.
Design is “no longer just the classic interpretation of luxury, that is, formal service, large guestrooms, extensive public spaces with a broad range of facilities. We’re not saying properties like this are not performing or will not continue to be built, but there’s a new, additional type of lifestyle product that sits within the realms of luxury,” hotel designer David Harte said.
Tell Me More
The experts on Tell Me More noted inflation continued to be a drag on the broad hotel industry, as average daily rate struggled to keep up with a broader price increase.
"In November, inflation was 2.7%, resulting in a 1.9% gap at average daily rate growth to the consumer price index, essentially meaning inflation-adjusted real ADR went backwards," STR's VP of Analytics Isaac Collazo said. "That's something we have to keep harping on, because it's important."
In a special bonus episode, Collazo and cohost Jan Freitag, CoStar Group's national director of hospitality analytics, made their predictions for the new year, which included the expectation that international inbound travel to the U.S. will continue to be slow.
"I just don't see [a full rebound]," Freitag said. "I think the dollar is going to continue to be very strong, making the United States just very expensive to come to from Europe and Asia, and I think the number of international travelers to the U.S. will still be below ... the prior peak."
Next Gen in Lodging
On the latest episode of Next Gen in Lodging, host Davonne Reaves connects with Wanderland founders Saar Shai and Alicia Zur-Szpiro on the importance of marketing to younger generations.
The pair came to hospitality not through traditional routes but through many kid-focused industries such as video games, toys and publishing.
"Everything we've done really has this common thread of entertaining kids, drawing out new ways that they play, that they interact, that they imagine," Zur-Szpiro said. "About a year ago, we brought that lens to the world of hospitality, looking at what is going on for kids and teens, and to our surprise, we found that actually relatively little is happening."