Category: Recent News

The hospitality and travel landscape in 2024 reflected the challenges of a global economy under pressure. Rising prices and relatively stagnant wage growth tightened disposable incomes, forcing consumers to rethink travel ideas.

Intellect Data Systems Arabia Limited (IDS Next), a leading provider of smart hospitality solutions, has officially been recognised by the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) as a qualified provider of Phase 2 E-Invoicing solutions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). This recognition strengthens IDS Next’s position as a key player in Saudi Arabia’s digital transformation efforts.

As a lodging industry training provider, we receive an extraordinarily high number of inquiries for guest service training specific to the topic areas of “handling guest complaints” and “service recovery.” While it is always great to see interest in these topics, we always prefer to deliver a more comprehensive approach to hospitality and guest services training that better serves all stakeholders.

Our research reveals an industry poised for transformation, with 82% of hospitality executives recognizing the game-changing potential of going beyond measuring performance by standard measures such as Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) alone to effectively measure and optimize Revenue per Available Guest (RevPAG). More importantly, 72% of hospitality executives are willing to invest in enhancing their current technology to tap into this potential. This metric isn’t just a number; it’s a fundamental reimagining of how we create value andmeasure success in our field.

EHL’s Dr. Sébastien Fernandez (Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior) teaches courses on Human Behavior and Performance, Emotional Intelligence and People Analytics. Sébastien is interested in helping the hospitality industry harness psychological forces that drive high performance in organizational settings and to make decisions (in areas such as hiring talent) with the help of innovative, evidence-based approaches.

Not knowing your niche, too-aggressive marketing, and failing to re-market effectively to OTA traffic…these are all key challenges facing hoteliers at the moment. But there are some profound opportunities, too. Find out more about the insights that came out of the Cendyn World Tour 2024 – London event.

Our 22nd webinar, held on 10 December, explored the impact of the 2024 Budget on the hospitality sector, highlighting concerns about increased costs from rising NI contributions and thresholds, minimum wage increases and business rates, with one of our experts noting that these changes could lead to a 10% increase in payroll costs, necessitating a 5%-7% revenue growth to mitigate the impact.

The U.S. hotel industry reported solid performance during the week ending 7 December 2024, lifted entirely by the second half of the week. Revenue per available room (RevPAR) over the first three days of the week, coming off the Thanksgiving weekend, produced negative year-over-year comparisons. On the flip side, the last three days of the week produced significant RevPAR gains.

I discuss this question with hoteliers way too often. It’s not their fault, but the reality is they don’t understand what this statement means and, in this piece, I’m going to lay it out for you. I will say that the lack of understanding and basic ignorance of this is a costly and completely avoidable expense if you just do a little digging and ask the right questions.

Booking.com is a leading review generation source in the majority of the world’s markets. Now, it is introducing significant updates to its review scoring system, and this change marks a watershed moment—particularly for hotels that haven’t been leveraging ReviewPro’s GRI.