Strategy tips

Over 14 years, hotel operator Hilton Worldwide has doubled its number of hotel and resort brands to 19 and more than doubled its number of rooms to 1.1 million. During the pandemic recovery, the McLean, Virginia-based hotel giant is looking to fine-tune its brands and portfolio, especially in light of its introduction in January of its first economy brand, Spark by Hilton.

To better understand the independent luxury hotel scene, I recently sat down with Gordon Drake, who last year became CEO of the Doyle Collection — an Irish family owned group of luxury hotels operating in Dublin, Cork, London, Bristol, and Washington D.C.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, April 6. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Corporate travel agencies are now seeing wide discrepancies in airfares after American Airlines overhauled its ticket distribution strategy.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Monday, April 17. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

As demand outpaces supply in the Indian hotels market, the asset-light Indian Hotels Company (IHCL) reported its highest-ever full year consolidated revenue and a profit after tax of $122 million — a historic first for the company.

For a brand around since 1907, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts has suddenly had a lot of activity. In January, parent company Accor installed new Fairmont CEO Mark Willis, who has been leading a rethink of the brand’s strategy. Some of the details about strategy changes will be revealed later this month at a conference with the general managers at the brand’s 86 hotels.

Young people made Airbnb a household name, and CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky doesn’t want his online travel agency to lose its cool factor. Chesky is pushing the online travel agency to evolve faster to give the next wave of emerging travelers what they want most, namely, affordable places to stay and a hip, intuitive booking interface.

What will the new Tripadvisor look like? CEO Matt Goldberg, on the job since July, laid out the vision and some of the early results as part of the company’s first quarter earnings announcement.

Capital A’s long-haul budget carrier AirAsia X reported its return to black with a net profit of $71 million and a revenue of $119 million in the first quarter of 2023.  

One was an old dairy factory in Stuttgart. Another, an old bread factory in Salzburg. In Cologne, there’s also a former headquarters of German federal intelligence. Now – they are all a&o hostels. You can stay at one for about 43 dollars a day.

Ask Skift is our artificial intelligence chatbot that offers a new way for readers to better engage with our breadth of knowledge and our latest experimentation creating products travel professionals rely on. It digs into news stories, Skift Research reports, Airline Weekly issues, Skift Live events, the Daily Lodging Report, and more to answer many questions about the travel industry.

If you listen to the half-dozen largest, publicly held hotel groups based in the U.S. and Europe, you would think owning the hotels you run is a terrible strategy and that providing large hotels for conventions and group bookings is a bad idea. Yet Loews, a publicly held holding company, is happily pursuing both strategies in its hotel business.

Occupancy is at its lowest, losses are mounting, and the company announced another round of layoffs last month. Despite this, the luxury hospitality brand Inspirato has a few wins, including a new partnership with Capital One, and a rewards program launch.

Capital One, which operates a travel portal and already invested $96 million in online travel agency Hopper last year, said it intends to invest $25 million through a convertible note in luxury hospitality company Inspirato.

Accor said on Monday that it had named Gilda Perez-Alvarado as its group chief strategy officer in charge of overseeing global strategy, relations with hotel owners, and strategic partnerships.