In late 2024, The Don CeSar — the historic Gulf Coast resort located in St. Pete Beach, Florida — was devastated by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, arriving just twelve days apart, that inflicted extensive damage to the property’s infrastructure, inventory and guest-facing amenities.
In the lifecycle of a hotel, no period is more fraught with risk or filled with opportunity than the final countdown to opening. While the focus for months, or even years, is on construction, the pivot to operational readiness is where long-term success is truly forged. For hotel owners, navigating this phase effectively is the difference between opening with momentum and playing catch-up in the first year.
The first thing you need to know about me and the most important piece of context you could have reading this blog is that I'm the very proud father of two sons, the youngest of which is just shy of 8 months old.
The hospitality industry has seen significant transformations over the past two decades, largely due to the rise of cruise tourism and short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb and Vrbo. While hotels once dominated the market for travelers and tourists, increasing competition from these alternative accommodations has reshaped demand patterns, pricing strategies and occupancy rates. Understanding how these industries influence hotel performance is crucial for hotel operators looking to navigate the evolving travel landscape.
As a team of project management professionals, we are often brought on board to assist investors as they look to plan and manage renovations of their select service hotels due to a brand-mandated property improvement plans. The success or failure of a capital project can be traced directly back to these early moments in a project timeline.
To Eastcheap Records in the city of London on Oct. 14 for a gathering of former students of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, to celebrate the Newark campus’ collection of jazz records, artifacts and paraphernalia, widely considered to be the world’s finest and most comprehensive.
At a recent dinner party, the conversation turned toward hotels, as it always does when I'm around. A friend asked, “Where should we go in Phuket with our kids? Somewhere with a yoga pavilion and healthy food?” All eyes turned to me, the "hotel boy." I already knew how this would play out: My own biological database of properties would include excellent matches that AI would miss. Still, for fun, I played along when someone asked ChatGPT.
In-room dining is considered a valuable amenity to guests, and offering this service also is required to participate in luxury consortia as well as to achieve prestigious star ratings. With the continued increasing cost of labor and goods in today’s environment, many urban luxury hotels have seen margin declines and exacerbated losses in the room-service department.
Over the last few years, perhaps since the pandemic’s end, I have received dozens of emails in which somewhere the phrase “The Golden Age of Travel” is used, seemingly bandied about with reckless abandon.
There’s no doubt that today’s hotel leaders have to be technophiles, embracing the ever-changing world of the business ecosystem and somehow managing to get all their API- connected tech to work in unison.
Most hotel owners think artificial intelligence is on the horizon. It is already here. From voice tech to predictive maintenance, today’s hotels are running on systems that did not exist a decade ago. The 1990s brought the Internet, the 2000s brought the iPhone, Android, Twitter (X), LinkedIn, Facebook (Meta), and the social media storm that followed. Today, it is AI, electric and autonomous vehicles and more.
