Hotel Execs Face New Reporting Challenge. Here's What They Need to Know.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Tuesday, September 12. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Hyatt sees signs that more people in big cities are returning to offices, which could eventually translate to more business transient travel at the hotel giant.

New York City’s short-term rental regulations could slash up to 70% of Airbnb’s 23,000 active listings in the city after September 5. Experts are divided on how the move might affect hotels, and their forecasts are foggy. Yet the analyses reveal interesting details about this critical lodging market regardless.

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Can hotels exert more influence in policy-making? Where will future development growth come from? Is generative AI relevant to the hotel sector? These and other subjects will be top of mind for us as we interview top bosses at Hilton, Hyatt, Accor, and other hotel leaders on-stage at the Skift Global Forum in New York on September 26-28.

Accor, the Paris-based hotel giant, said on Tuesday that Omer Acar will head its brands Raffles & Orient Express as of March 1. Acar will join Accor’s other brand CEOs in its luxury and lifestyle group (Fairmont, Sofitel & MGallery, and Ennismore) — all of whom report directly to group CEO Sébastian Bazin.

Not all hotels should pursue remote workers, a hotel group CEO has suggested, because they mostly served their purpose during the pandemic.

Hotel company Sonesta said on Tuesday it would launch a new brand, Sonesta Essential, and offer a just-added brand, The James, to developers.

Entrepreneur Richard Branson and Virgin Group announced a reorganization of their hotel brands on Thursday. Virgin Group, which owns a half-dozen luxury Virgin Hotels, will take control of Branson’s private collection of hotels, retreats, and islands (including Branson’s own much-hyped Necker Island), marketed as Virgin Limited Edition.

Skift unveiled the 2023 edition of its annual Megatrends this week and in the mix, as you’d expect, is the phenomenon of the blended traveler.

A pent-up surge in consumer demand for travel gave many hotel companies pricing power in 2022. But hoteliers charged the highest rates the market could support for more than just one-off circumstantial reasons. A critical ingredient in the formula was that hoteliers developed a newfound pricing discipline during the pandemic recovery — even when business travel was historically weak and international tourism was slow to recover in many markets.

Japan intends to draw a record number of inbound travelers in 2025, according to a draft of a government plan seen by Kyodo News on Thursday.