The first of its kind, The Hospitality Show is a bold new event for the entire hospitality ecosystem with one shared goal: operating hotels efficiently and profitably. Brought to you by The American Hotel & Lodging Association and Hotel Management, the event will bring together top industry leaders, senior executives of hotel brands, owners, operators, management companies and procurement specialists—and their teams—to discover, network and drive profitability.
Business accelerates when the right people are in the room, and this new weekly series of advisory board interviews goes 1:1 with the industry’s best and brightest as they build the inaugural event to be held June 27-29, 2023 at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas.
In this installment, we catch up with Glenn Haussman, founder and host of No Vacancy News.
What issues are currently causing headaches for the industry?
Haussman: Well, there's myriad issues affecting absolutely everything in our business but I think the ones that really come to the fore are the difficulty with finding people to work in hotels for the amount of money that's being offered, and I say that very specifically, how much money is being paid. Employees aren't necessarily feeling that they're getting paid the right amount of money for the jobs that they're doing. The other thing that is the biggest issue is that retention issue because if you're not able to retain those employees, it's going to cost you a lot more money in the long run. I just wish that hoteliers would look at the overall costs and figure out a way to pay people a little bit more, which will actually save them money because they won't have to replace as many people in the future. But hey, that's just me. The other big issue, I think, really affecting the industry right now, of course, is the cost of goods and services. Things have been going up, up and up and over time it's going to become a little bit more difficult to keep charging people more and more money for hotel room. It’s a particularly serious issue as group business really comes back, as transient business travelers comes back because they're only going to spend a certain amount. And of course, you're running up against whatever the government is going to pay for you and that is rigid and not flexible.
What will it take for those issues to smooth out and when do you anticipate that will happen?
Haussman: So the pricing issue with how much goods and services cost will probably mediate over time but I can't say for sure how long that's going to take. Right now the Federal Reserve is continuing to push up those interest rates to tamp down that inflation. They're not doing enough yet to tamp down that inflation to a level that's going to be meaningful to all of us. So there's still some of that fear that's out there. As far as handling the equation with workers. Well, that is already starting to balance itself out. There's a million roles that can be filled in hospitality, which incidentally, according to the AHLA, it was about that same number prior to the pandemic. So there's more hotels, now. There's more restaurants. Now there's more of all of that stuff in hospitality now. But still the same amount of jobs that need to be filled. So that tells me they're actually moving in the right direction. We're in a good place.
What new trends do you see affecting the hospitality industry the most in 2023?
Haussman: What we're really seeing post-pandemic is an acceleration of trends that were already in the marketplace, there's nothing wholly new, there's just a return of some things and a bursting through of some other trends that were kind of below the radar beforehand. The big one that I see really coming to the fore right now is the whole idea of the outdoors. A lot of hotel brands are starting to get involved in that. You see that brand Field and Stream, for example, you see a lot more emphasis on glamping and a lot more companies that are focused on blending hospitality with an outdoor life. You even see old-school RV parks that have been traditionally mom-and-pop owned and very unsophisticated when it comes to the modern methodology of running hospitality products get a lot more savvy and start to include treehouses, high-end RV, Airstream trailers, all sorts of cool stuff that's really playing into that particular theme. So the outdoor stuff, I think, over the next five years is going to become big, big, big, and five years from now will be in the conversation as extended-stay has been over the last couple of years. Other big trends I see in hospitality is hotel owners are really figuring out what their technology strategy is going to be moving forward, combining savings through finding great technologies for back-of-house, finding great technologies to get guests more interested in staying in their hotels, while they're still in the ideation phase of what kind of trips they want to take those sorts of things. So technology, technology, technology is going to be the big deal continuing going forward. Now how companies are going to be approaching that could be completely different. You get companies such as a Highgate, for example, which is looking to create its own tech stack by either investing and buying other companies or creating their own. So that's one approach and other brands out there are going to be looking for best-of-breed products and incorporating them into their family of offerings in order to make their properties more successful.
What do you see as the biggest opportunities for the industry as we make our way through 2023?
Haussman: That's a little bit tough to say. It really depends on how you break it down. I think one big opportunity is reinventing food-and-beverage services in your hotels, for example. The whole idea of getting the community to come in, creating a focal point. And, selfishly speaking, I'm working with a couple of companies to help with that. I think one opportunity is to bring live music to hotels, and that's why I'm working with a company called Creative Exchange to help that happen. I love live music, people love live music, and it's a great way to get folks into your doors to sell that food and highly profitable beverage items. Another big opportunity on the investment side, I think we're going to see, with the CMBS stuff coming due this summer, a lot of money is owed so you're probably going to see people that have been kicking the can down the road over the last few years since COVID began maybe start to sell properties and give folks good opportunity to get in there at a lower to replacement value. I was just at the California Lodging Investment Conference and a Hyatt Place operated by Twenty Four Seven Hotels up in Sacramento won their deal of the year in the select-service category and that was an adaptive reuse property. Those are fantastic. So I think we're gonna see a lot more of those when it comes to some of these distressed assets being sold, properties being reinvented, brought into the 21st century, even though they have roots in the past.
What do you think the industry’s biggest win this year will be?
Haussman: I think the biggest win will be for everyone a return to perceived stability. I’m getting tired of people being uncomfortable, right now still being worried. I think we're in a perpetual universe of the recession being six months away. I think everyone's going to come to terms with the fact that things are good. As an industry, we need to get out of our collective mindset of negativity, negativity, negativity, and start focusing on the positive so we could all be winners in the coming year.
What are you most looking forward to at The Hospitality Show?
Haussman: I'm looking forward to seeing friends of mine from all the different disciplines in hospitality coming together. No longer will I have to go to a design show to see some people, a tech show to see other people, a finance show to see some people. Fortunately, everyone is going to be in the same room together. And I'm really looking forward to seeing a cohesiveness between all these different categories really come to life because that's the way it's going to be. Also, I'm looking forward to being the official podcast of The Hospitality Show, broadcasting on the show floor this summer. That should be a whole lot of fun.