As the hotel industry faces a period of flattening demand and continued cost creep, hospitality executives have outlined the increasing needs for efficiency and managing a tight labor market.

Here are some highlights from recent interviews on Hotel News Now podcasts.

New Aimbridge Hospitality CEO Craig Smith wants his organization, the largest global third-party hotel operator, to be more streamlined and efficient. Smith shared with HNN's Bryan Wroten how he's been focused on cutting out the layers between corporate, owners and general managers.

Smith said it's relatively easy to come in as a new leader and shake things up, but the long-term challenge will be to keep out corporate bloat over time.

“It’s a discipline thing,” he said. “You’ll find layers will grow, and you’ve got to cut them out. They’ll grow, and you cut them out. That’s all part of leadership. I’ve seen it over my 37 years in the industry, but you can’t lose sight of what’s the most important thing, and that’s the hotel. That’s where you drive success.”

PM Hotel Group President and CEO Joseph Bojanowski shared how labor continues to be a sore spot across hotels and restaurants, in particular, but he's hopeful that better immigration policy could help alleviate the issue.

"There was an — and arguably rightfully — an exodus from when we essentially closed every restaurant in the entire country," he said. "That causes people to go find other jobs and careers, and they haven't come back. So that's a problem across the board."

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sonesta Hotels International has seen outsized growth from acquisitions and one-off conversions from a related company, but Sonesta executives say they're now in the early stages of a new era of organic growth in franchising.

"This year will be the first year in our number of franchise openings is now surpassing the number of exits in a large franchise system," Executive Vice President and President of Franchise and Development Keith Pierce said. "To Brian [Quinn] and the team's credit, we'll probably open 80 hotels this year organically, and that started with really no pipeline."

There's been some hand-wringing over the fact leisure demand — and rates — have softened somewhat this summer compared to the outsized growth seen in recent years. But Marriott International Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Development Leeny Oberg said her company will still realize global revenue per available room growth of 3% to 5% this year and she expects long-term travel trends will continue.

"When you look more broadly, and you think about the fundamentals that drive our business and you see a fairly stable economy in the U.S. and continued really great interest in travel, both domestically and abroad, that it does bode well for the industry, not just this year, but for years to come," she said.

Kevin Ellis, general manager at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa on Del Monte Golf Course, joined the HNN podcast to discuss his summer demand expectations for the season. He expects 2024 will be similar to 2023, even if pricing power is scaling back.

“Perhaps we're seeing a little bit of rate erosion, but perhaps trading that for a couple of points in occupancy, so RevPAR seems to be growing year over year,” he said.

Zooming out to a more global perspective, STR's area director for Asia-Pacific Jesper Palmqvist said weaker-than-expected holiday travel in China is fueling a wave of pessimism across the region.

He said there's been a notable drop in sentiment in the region that is yet to be reflected in performance data, although that could soon become the case as the lag time between the two shrinks.

"It's kind of like the booking window," Palmqvist said. "I think it used to be a bit longer, but now it's shorter."

There are reasons for optimism when it comes to inbound international travel to the U.S., said CoStar's Emmy Hise and Tourism Economics' Daryl Cronk, but travelers from Asia continue to be the slowest to recover.

Hise, CoStar's senior director of hospitality analytics for the Western U.S., said this is playing out in performance in West Coast markets.

"They're the least recovered in terms of both international inbound and occupancy, in general," she said. "However, when you look at the share of demand from international — the share of overnight visitors for total hotels occupied room nights in 2019 and the trailing 12 months 2024 — that share is actually even. What that tells us is there's more going on in San Francisco than just the international recovery."

On a special episodes of Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast, CoStar's Jan Freitag and STR's Isaac Collazo dove into why STR and Tourism Economics revised their full-year forecast for hotel performance downward. In short, the hospitality industry didn't keep up with broader economic growth.

"We knew GDP was going to get stronger, which it did," Collazo said. "But early this year and late last year we saw a decoupling of GDP and demand. We expected it to narrow as we got into 2024, meaning, we expected it to get back to its historical play — as the economy grows, so does demand. Well, that didn't happen."

The forecast revision dropped full-year RevPAR growth from 4% to 2%. Freitag said most of the pain is being felt on the lower end of the travel spectrum.

"It's still growth," he said. "The economy sector is just unfortunately taking it on the chin, and we expect RevPAR to decelerate, but the upper end of the market continues to just chug along."

On the Next Gen in Lodging Podcast, host Davonne Reaves spoke with marketing experts about how they're deploying artificial intelligence in their jobs. Jason Pirock, head of marketing for Springboard Hospitality, said hoteliers should be embracing technology.

"I say that because the way that I'm looking at it is it's ultimately — it's been around for a long time. Whether [it's] machine-learning versus AI — it's been called a lot of different things. Obviously, it's had its sort of resurgence more recently, but I ultimately look at it as support. I look at it as an extension of what you do in order to be more productive, maybe more efficient," he said on the latest episode.

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