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Many years ago, a friend shared some advice with me: It doesn’t cost much more to enjoy a first-class experience.

If you’ve scanned through the top news stories of the last few months, you’re likely well acquainted with the post-pandemic elephant in the room: record-high inflation. As expected, the collective (and prolonged) halt of global economies, the subsequent critical supply chain disruptions, and the ongoing war in Ukraine has placed significant pressure on the economic outlook. With inflation staying low over the last ten years (1.88% on average), the current rise (8% annual average in 2022) has begun to make ripples across industries, and hospitality is no exception.

The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP27, took place from 7-18 November 2022. Sponsored by EHL and nominated by CarbonCare InnoLab (CCIL), I was grateful to have the opportunity to participate in this large annual climate conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

Hoteliers have a language problem, but it’s not what you think. It’s not the ability to speak to people from other countries. It’s the way they sell their products – their rooms. Given the amount of competition in the hotel industry, you would think that product differentiation would be a priority. But go to almost any hotel website and you will find the exact same products. The Standard Room. The Superior Room. The Junior Suite.

Learning to throw out the rule book and be flexible was among the most valuable lessons hotels learned from the pandemic. Adaptation and flexibility are still just as important now, as the industry navigates the staffing shortages, and to find out more about what that should look like in the F&B space, we have interviewed Kim Haasarud, a nationally recognized mixologist and Beverage Expert at Strategic Solution Partners.

When Disneyland Resort, Anaheim’s crown jewel, was forced to close in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, area hotels faced some of the greatest demand losses in the nation. The park system welcomed back its local fanbase in 2021 with the introduction of a new reservation system. Once Disney attendees were more familiar with the park’s new reservation system, which requires advance planning and makes it more difficult to book same-day tickets, leisure demand rebounded, spurring double-digit ADR growth in 2021 and 2022.

The hotel sector, until the past few decades, had been largely unchanged for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But the growth of models that have allowed operations to be split away from ownership has caused a shift in the industry that is still playing out.

"Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?" Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously addressed the negative consequences of boredom, and, I must say, I agree. In the German language, specifically, the term "boredom" is perfectly represented by the word "Langeweile," which can be loosely translated as "long while." This linguistic construction, composed of "lange" (long) and "Weile" (while), reflects the assumption that boredom is characterized by a perception of time passing slowly. Let me show you this empirically. Remember when your nerdy friend invited you to sit through Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings director’s cut edition*? That’s langeweile.

Mark Britton Jones, Consultant Faculty at Glion Institute of Higher Education’s London campus, attempts to answer a question on which the health of a multi-billion dollar market depends – what is luxury going to look like a decade from now?

Despite projections of persistent inflation and a moderate economic recession, CBRE’s November 2022 Hotel Horizons® forecast calls for a 5.8% increase in rooms revenue per available room (RevPAR) in 2023. This is up from CBRE’s previous forecast of a 5.6% increase in RevPAR for 2023.