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1. Marriott signs deal to bring luxury wellness brand Lefay into portfolio
A new joint venture between Marriott International and the Leali family will bring the luxury wellness brand Lefay into Marriott's portfolio of brands, CoStar News' Bryan Wroten reports.
The brand currently has two luxury resorts in Italy, with a pipeline of three more including a Swiss Alps property.
This marks the first Marriott brand exclusively focused on the luxury wellness segment.
The new joint venture will own the brand and intellectual property, while the Leali family will continue to control underlying real estate.
2. Iran specifically looks to harm Middle East tourism
Harming tourism across the Middle East is one of the goals of recent missile strikes by Iran, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. While the first wave of attacks focused on oil and gas production, Iranian officials are also looking to harm burgeoning industries across the region, including travel.
"Over the weekend, Iranian drones damaged major aluminum smelting operations in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, while hitting port cranes in Oman," the newspaper reports. "Iranian munitions have struck data centers and bank offices, as well as the region’s modern seaports and airports, neutralizing them as trade hubs. On Sunday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps took aim at education centers, with threats to attack regional campuses of American universities in a fresh escalation of the tit-for-tat attacks on civilian or economic targets that are beginning to characterize periods of the war."
3. New York hotels maintain allure despite regulatory challenges
New York City is an exceptionally difficult market to build hotels, experts say, and not much easier to run one, but it remains a favored destination for hotel investors, reports CoStar News contributor Harvey Chipkin.
The recently opened Kimpton Era Midtown New York is a notable exception in a market with little-to-no supply growth, and high-end hotels could be the only to pencil for the foreseeable future.
“Given the extraordinarily high costs of developing a hotel in New York City, due to land and permitting costs as well as the highest real estate taxes and wage and benefit rates in the U.S., large luxury hotels are the only ones that could come close to being profitable on a stabilized basis,” said Vijay Dandapani, CEO of the Hotel Association of New York.
4. Mixed signals arise in latest consumer confidence data
Consumer confidence went up slightly in March, but people have growing concerns over the labor market and inflation, Reuters reports.
The price of gasoline, which averaged over $4 a gallon for the first time in nearly four years, is likely to have ripple effects, experts say.
"This is not a good omen for the health and vitality of the labor market," said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at FWDBONDS. "Companies have grown more cautious as the price of gasoline has risen over a dollar a gallon since the war began, and consumers have become much less confident."
5. FAA cuts back on flights to San Francisco
While there have been recent positive signs for San Francisco as a travel market, the city could soon be challenged with airlift. Runway construction and safety concerns have caused the Federal Aviation Administration to cut a third of arrivals to San Francisco International Airport, the Associated Press reports.
At issue is the airport's longstanding practice of landing two planes at the same time on parallel runways.
"The San Francisco safety concerns are unique to that airport because of how close the parallel runways are and how complicated the airspace is with several surrounding airports," the news agency reports. "The San Francisco Bay Area is served by three major airports, including San José Mineta International Airport and Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport, and smaller ones."