When is a confirmed hotel reservation not confirmed? When the hotel has sold your room to someone else, as Linda and Michael Morgan learned over the Thanksgiving holiday.
As American companies negotiate airline and hotel rates for 2011, they are encountering a market much different from a year ago, when the economy, and business travel with it, were still feeble.
Travel-related apps are generally better in theory than in practice – at least that’s the argument of last week’s App Smart column—so you may want to save that $10 for an actual book and not the app.
The hotel industry in the United States appears to be rebounding this summer, mainly because of strengthening business travel. Travelers should not count on last-minute availability. So far the biggest beneficiary is New York, though other cities on the East Coast are starting to report gains as well. And the upscale, full-service hotels that have long been favored by business travelers have benefited more from the upturn in demand than the midlevel brands, industry analysts say.
A study released this year by SpiderLabs, a part of the data-security consulting company Trustwave, found that 38 percent of the credit card hacking cases last year involved the hotel industry. The sector was well ahead of the financial services industry (19 percent), retailing (14.2 percent), and restaurants and bars (13 percent).
Amid signs that their industry has finally turned a corner after two dark years, hotel executives have begun to plot strategies for better times ahead. But those strategies differ, depending on whether they are running a big chain or independent hotel.
The Paramount Bay condominium is a 47-story steel-and-glass cadaver. Conceived at the height of the real estate boom as another ultraluxury tower in a city that would soon be choking on them, it looms unfinished and unoccupied on Biscayne Bay.
Andrew Cosslett is C.E.O. of InterContinental Hotels Group, based near London. He says rugby helped teach him how to deal with adversity, and to rally a team.
Though it may seem counterintuitive at a time when many hotels around the country are having trouble filling their rooms, nearly 100 hotels are scheduled to open in major American cities this year.
