What’s on Your bucket list for 2012?

Want to be in all the right places in 2012? If you’re a developing hotel company, you need to be in New York to get strong brand exposure. If you want to get in on the exploding Chinese hotel development scene, you must have an office on site in China to earn the trust of those who do business there. Need to be on the inside track when it comes to social networking? Opt for Facebook as the best venue from which to actually generate booking revenue and focus on the user-generated reviews provided on Trip Advisor.

That’s just some of the wisdom I culled from my interview with Nicholas Clayton, president of the Viceroy Group, for the cover story in this issue of Hotel Management. If there are other lessons to be learned from the executive, who is equally adept on the management and the development sides of the business, it’s to keep growing in your career. Don’t settle into your comfort zone; instead, seek roles where you will face the unknown and be able to grow. That takes courage, especially these days, when settling in to a comfort zone, even if for just a short while, would be a luxury to most of us. To learn more on how Clayton, who has held executive positions at Ritz-Carlton and Mandarin Oriental and now Viceroy, has navigated his way through his own career bucket list, see pages 22-24.

As I write this, signs that the economy is slowly improving are trickling in every day. Manufacturing and the labor market appear to be inching upward and the housing market may be on its way to a tenuous rebound. Heck, even Starbucks is raising the price of a “tall” coffee by 10 cents in many of its markets, due not only to higher commodity prices but because “consumers have returned to small luxuries like lattes,” the AP reported.

Best sign of all? TravelClick in its North American Hospitality Review said things are looking good for the hotel industry in 2012, with the timeframe of Dec. 1, 2011, through Nov. 30, 2012, showing a forecasted average daily rate increase of 3.6 percent and a forecasted revenue per available room gain of 5.3 percent. Executives credit the “slow and steady” increase with a strong business travel segment and “slow but positive occupancy gains” in the group business market.

I’m also putting my money on the leisure transient business. Travel, like that tall Starbucks latte, is a required luxury that consumers will always come back to when the economy shows signs of lifting. Everyone’s got their own bucket list to fulfill, after all, and that’s not going to go away anytime soon.