The hotel industry in 2023 is projected to surpass pre-pandemic levels of demand, nominal room revenue and state and local tax revenue, while inching closer to other key 2019 performance metrics, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association’s 2023 State of the Hotel Industry Report.

The report, which forecasts that operational challenges such as staffing shortages and economic factors will replace COVID as hoteliers’ top concerns, is based on data and analysis from Oxford Economics and was created in collaboration with AHLA Platinum Partners STR, Avendra, Ecolab, Encore, and Oracle.
 
The top findings of the report include:

• 2023 nominal room revenue is projected to reach new heights ($197.48 billion vs. $170.35 billion in 2019). While these numbers are not adjusted for inflation, and real revenue recovery will likely take several more years, the trendlines are positive.
• 2023 room-night demand is projected to surpass pre-pandemic levels (1.3 billion occupied room nights vs. 1.29 billion in 2019).
• Hotels are expected to generate $46.71 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2023, up from $41.11 billion in 2019.
• Average hotel occupancy is expected to reach 63.8% in 2023 – just shy of 2019’s 65.9%.
• Staffing is expected to remain a significant challenge for U.S. hotels in 2023, with hotels projected to employ 2.09 million people in 2023, down from 2.35 million in 2019.
• Inflation for a number of hospitality-related products will continue to run 5% to upwards of 10% for the next few quarters, according to AHLA Platinum Partner Avendra.
• Group business has a bright future: AHLA Platinum Partner Encore reports that 70% of planners surveyed for the company’s Fall 2022 Planner Pulse Report were either booking or actively sourcing new events, and 61% expected to have larger budgets in 2023.

“Three years after the unprecedented hardships our industry faced due to the pandemic, hotels continue to make significant strides toward recovery,” said AHLA President & CEO Chip Rogers. “2022 saw one of the strongest summer travel seasons ever, and this year we expect hotels to reach new heights in terms of room revenue, room-night demand and state and local tax revenue. But when inflation is taken into account, our industry likely won’t see full recovery for several more years. Nevertheless, hotel performance is trending in the right direction – great news for our industry and our employees, who are enjoying better pay, more career opportunities, upward mobility and flexibility than ever before.”

To help hotels fill open jobs and raise awareness of the hotel industry’s 200+ career pathways, the AHLA Foundation’s “A Place to Stay” multi-channel advertising campaign is now active in 14 cities, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New York, Orlando, Phoenix, San Diego, and Tampa. For more info on the campaign, visit thehotelindustry.com.

Additionally, AHLA affiliate “Hospitality is Working” recently launched the Workforce & Immigration Initiative. The effort is aimed at urging Congress to address workforce shortages with bipartisan solutions to incorporate more immigrants into the American economy. You can learn more about the effort here.

Download the full State of the Industry report here.

Quantum Metric, the Continuous Product Design platform for customer-driven digital experiences, announced the launch of Atlas, a first-to-market structured and accelerated solution to answering the most critical business questions about an organization's digital experiences. Powered by proprietary machine intelligence and mapping learnings from hundreds of leading brands and digital teams, Atlas provides outcome-driven insight that enables anyone to easily identify and respond to digital customer needs from day one.

"Atlas completely reimagines what we know about building and optimizing digital experiences today," said Mario Ciabarra, CEO of Quantum Metric. "Organizations consistently struggle to know if their teams are asking the right business questions and working hard to drive their experience forward to the benefit of both their business and their customer. With Atlas, we are empowering every member of digital teams to focus on what matters most, winning the hearts of their customers. This is a defining day for Quantum Metric that sets a new standard for the type of value our current and future customers can expect from our platform." 

Atlas is a comprehensive library of pre-built industry guides within the Quantum Metric platform, providing a step-by-step approach to improving critical digital use cases through a tailored set of dashboards, metrics, anomaly detection, and alerts. A proven and structured approach to analysis, Atlas introduces the next evolution in the practices of Continuous Product Design. Digital teams can confidently define customer needs across any digital journey faster, regardless of their past experience with the Quantum Metric platform.

As digital becomes a primary driver of business sales and revenue, organizations are facing major hurdles in decreasing the time between identifying digital opportunities and taking action. Added to this are teams' limited ability to capture every customer frustration, including small customer touchpoints that when added together can have a massive effect on the customer experience. These challenges have an immediate impact on digital ROI. According to Quantum Metric, the average enterprise leaves up to $220M on the table per year in inefficiencies, with digital teams taking up to four weeks to resolve digital issues or optimize experiences. With Atlas' simplified approach, organizations can improve their efficiency by up to 90%, resolving issues in one to two days.

"The hospitality industry has seen significant digital acceleration over the past few years as they’ve raced to keep up with customer expectations and desires to engage with brands digitally," says Danielle Harvey, vice president, travel & hospitality strategy at Quantum Metric. "From booking and online-ordering to mobile check-in and curbside pick-up, there are more technology touchpoints than ever before — which means more possibilities for customers to experience barriers or friction in their journey, if not fully optimized.

"Through Atlas’ travel and hospitality guides, brands can quickly and easily understand performance across key experiences like booking, in-stay, order fulfillment, and loyalty in real-time," Harvey continues. "Atlas provides hospitality companies with a more structured way to proactively identify guest-facing friction points that are driving poor customer experiences, including those experiences that may have not made it to the call center or a customer survey, but are having a profound impact on the customer and the business. It’s about helping lean teams throughout the industry better understand their core customers, and proactively focus on what matters most to improve customer satisfaction and their business' bottom line."

The introduction of Atlas will transform other areas of the Quantum Metric platform, such as:

• Provide guided analysis on-site with Visible: Enable team members with Atlas insight with an intuitive entry point via Visible, which shows data in line with the site experience.
• Use-case-driven navigation: Enhancing platform accessibility by organizing the Atlas guide library by top use case categories and focus areas.
• Automated segmentation for deeper analysis: Connecting users to deeper and more personalized analysis that supports outcome-driven results.

According to a recent report from Forrester, authored by senior analyst, Zhi-Ying Barry, "Forrester's research shows that advanced insights-driven firms are five times as likely to grow revenue by 20% or more. This depends on firms' ability to harness and apply data and analytics at every opportunity and base operating models on insights that lead to clear action embedded in software."

At launch, Quantum Metric's Atlas library offers 90 guides, with customized use cases for consumer banking, travel, retail, insurance, and telecommunications. Cross-industry guides will also be offered for common use cases faced by digital organizations today, regardless of their industry. 

For more information about Atlas, visit: quantummetric.com/atlas

Rad Technologies, Inc., doing business as Rad Intelligence, an artificial intelligence company that automates ROI-based creative intelligence, announced today that they have signed Jurny, a leading hospitality-tech company, as a client.

Founded in 2017, Jurny is the fastest-growing vertically integrated hospitality platform powered by AI and connectivity. Through their fully integrated Management Operating System (MOS), they automate operations and guest experiences for some of the world’s most exceptional hotel brands, vacation and short-term rental (STR) properties. The system’s recent integration with AI has allowed Jurny to fully automate guest communications and tech support, at a rate of 10 times human output, and they have now partnered with RAD AI to fuel their growth with influencer marketing strategies.

With the adoption of ChatGPT, marketers have increased their attention to artificial intelligence solutions. In recent months, RAD AI has seen a recent spike in commercial adoption across industries such as hospitality, entertainment, education, healthcare and gaming. Adding Jurny to their client portfolio further validates their expert utilization of AI and position as the leader in creative intelligence for influencer marketing.

RAD AI CEO, Jeremy Barnett, added, “We are always excited to work with key industry players with bleeding edge technologies.” Barnett continued, “Jurny is no different. What they’ve been able to accomplish with their best-in-class solution for hospitality—through the integration of AI—is something that really hits home for us. We are excited to be apart of their growth story as they continue to establish themselves as the leader in the hospitality technology space for years to come”

Jurny’s CEO, Luca Zambello, commented, "We are thrilled to be working with RAD AI to take our marketing efforts to the next level. It is very rewarding to work with another cutting edge company that understands how to best leverage AI within their field. Their expertise in AI further verifies our own capabilities, which is why we've decided to work with them as we team up to drive commercial adoption of our suite of AI-enabled hospitality products.”

VROMO announced a new delivery partnership with Uber Direct.   

VROMO’s partnership with Uber will help U.S. restaurants meet demand for delivery by strengthening their delivery capabilities through greater coverage and lower rates. The VROMO solution provides restaurant operators with the opportunity to access anetwork of independent couriers for all delivery orders, or to supplement the efforts of the in-house delivery staff. According to Vromo, restaurants will not only be able to increase their delivery capacity, but also cut down on costs by up to 24 percent. In addition, it will provide restaurant brands with better control over the customer journey, with order tracking links enabling them to interact and engage with consumers while they wait for their food.

Delivery Matters

“Throughout 2023, we expect to see even more restaurant brands strengthening their delivery capability," said VROMO Chief Executive Officer, Brian Hickey, pictured.  "Our partnership with Uber Eats will help restaurants to increase their delivery fulfillment and drive down their operational costs. VROMO was created to make delivery more profitable for restaurant brands and in doing so, help the sustainability of the sector at a time when market conditions are particularly challenging.”

Integrating with third-party delivery systems is impacting POS purchase decisions for 29% of restaurants, according to HT’s2 2023 POS Software Trends Report.

Integrated with several POS solutions and order aggregators, VROMO’s software platform makes the entire restaurant-to-door process more efficient for restaurants and allows them to monitor the progress of each order.

myDigitalOffice (MDO), the world's fastest-growing hotel data platform, today released an in-depth report uncovering hotel forecasting trends that gives owners and operators a better understanding of the dynamic demand environment in 2023.

By gathering input from leading operators, MDO has created a free online resource that addresses emerging trends in the hotel industry that directly affect hotel forecasting, including changes in booking patterns, new types of travelers, and a shift in focus to the bottom line.

What was once an annual process to determine the upcoming year’s budget, hoteliers today are updating their forecasts on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, plotting demand and financial goals more than a year in advance. Experts from Outrigger Hospitality Group, Remington Hotels, Sea Island Resort, Miraval Resorts, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, and Dragonfly Strategists lent their expertise to identify data and trends that are likely to affect a hotel's future business outlook.

Topics in the report include:

• New booking patterns to shape a hotel forecast
• Emerging segments of travelers that will affect your forecast
• Shifting forecasting focus to the bottom line
• Determining the most accurate data for your forecast
• Aligning operational departments with uniform data

“When you think of forward-looking data as only the competitor benchmarking tools, you’re missing your own internal dynamics,” says Mike Medsker, Product Head at MDO. “It’s great to see the market is up 5%, but you need to understand the trends behind the numbers and how they are going to impact your business internally.”

Download the free report here.

Knowland, the world’s leading provider of data-as-a-service insights on meetings and events for hospitality, released the quarterly update to its U.S. Meetings Recovery Forecast (MRF) and associated Top 25 U.S. Meetings Recovery Forecast (MRF25) realizing strong performance ending 2022 on a high note and shifting 2023 higher than the Q3 forecast. Click here to view the most current forecasts.

Kristi White, chief product officer, Knowland, said: “The fourth quarter outperformed the Knowland forecast by 8.4 percent, driven by top market growth. Additionally, both November and December exceeded 2019 numbers. This is the first time this has happened since the pandemic began. 2023 is poised to be a growth year, and hotels should be focused on optimizing demand and profitability.”

Knowland’s forecasts provide an overview of how the U.S. as a whole and the Top 25 Markets, specifically, will move through recovery. A breakdown of the details is below:

• U.S. Markets Recovery Forecast update – 2022 outperformed in Q4, raising the year-end capture to 77.8 percent from the October 2022 forecast of 73.1 percent recovery. Compared to 2019, the updated 2023 and 2024 forecasts are:
  • 2023 Recovery Forecast: 110.2 percent (106.4 percent in October forecast)
  • 2024 Recovery Forecast: 133.3 percent (129.2 percent in October forecast)
• Top 25 Markets Recovery Forecast update – Four markets (Dallas, Nashville, Phoenix, and Tampa) ended 2022 fully recovered to 2019 levels. Twelve markets outperformed the October forecast, including Anaheim, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oahu Island, Orlando, San Diego, Seattle, and St. Louis.
  • Recovery by the end of 2023: Thirteen markets are forecasted to achieve full recovery: Anaheim, Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oahu Island, Orlando, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Louis. Four markets (Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York) will end the year between 90 and 100 percent. The remaining four markets (Chicago, Las Vegas Philadelphia, and Washington, DC) will be under 90 percent.
  • Back to normal in 2024: All but two markets (Boston and Chicago) will be back to normal growth.
     

Knowland hosts a webinar featuring the final roll-up of 2022 recovery data as well as the forecast for 2023 today at 1:00PM ET. Register here.

Knowland will continue to host quarterly webinars reporting on the state of the industry, highlighting regional trends and booking disruptors. 

About the MRF and associated MRF25: The MRF demonstrates projected industry recovery patterns and is based on Knowland’s proprietary data and regression models leveraging almost 20 million global events over the last 15 years. The MRF25 was added in February 2022 to provide the capability to search industry recovery patterns for the Top 25 U.S. Markets. The forecast uses a natural recovery model, assuming historic seasonal patterns without major market disruption, to index the recapture of meeting activity compared to baseline levels from 2019. By comparing past data to evolving data trends, hoteliers can better understand market-relevant changes–and their implications–as individual markets move into 2022 and beyond.

Top 25 Markets: Anaheim, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Oahu Island, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, and Washington DC.