Skift Travel News Blog

Hyatt said on Thursday it would shift its strategy in marketing vacation rentals. It plans to launch before year-end a short-term vacation rental platform called Homes & Hideaways by World of Hyatt.

Hyatt also said it intended to sell its vacation rental management business — Destination Residences Management — to a company called Lowe, which, through an affiliate, will run it under Lowe and Coral Tree.

The Homes & Hideaways project will spotlight U.S. vacation rentals managed by Lowe, such as a home by the sea in Hawaii or a ski chalet in Colorado.

To book these vacation rentals, customers have to be one of the 40 million members of the hotelier’s loyalty program.

The move follows other plays in vacation rentals by major hotel groups, such as Marriott’s Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy and Accor’s OneFineStay.

Hyatt’s CEO elaborated on the company’s broader strategy on Wednesday at the Skift Global Forum (story below).

Hyatt Sees a Business Travel Rebound

Today’s edition of Skift’s daily podcast looks closer at Hyatt’s business travel optimism, Lufthansa’s strong signs, and Airbnb’s international playbook.

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Marriott International on Wednesday debuted Four Points Express by Sheraton, a midscale hotel brand aimed at Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The brand aims to target the “midscale” segment of affordable lodging. Marriott estimates that about a half-million independent or locally-branded hotels are in this segment — many of which may be ripe for conversion to a global brand.

The first hotel will be a 52-room property opening later this year in Lara, a district of Antalya in Turkey. Next year, another property in Turkey is likely to open. So is a 201-guestroom property in London near the Euston rail station.

Other hotel groups are also focusing on midscale brands, such as IHG’s Garner,
Hilton’s Spark brand and an upcoming (as-yet-unnamed) extended-stay brand, and Hyatt’s Hyatt Studios extended-stay brand.

Marriott International said it was streamlining its ongoing process of installing charging infrastructure for electric vehicles at its properties by signing a deal with the vendor EV Connect as its preferred EV charging provider for its properties in the U.S. and Canada.

Marriott has already installed roughly 2,400 chargers and charging stations for electric vehicles, and this first preferred vendor approach may help speed up adoption.

“With EV Connect, we can offer properties an end-to-end turnkey service, simplifying the planning, installation, and maintenance processes while simultaneously delivering high-quality service our guests expect,” said Andrew Bodziak, senior vice president of global operations at Marriott.

Owners and franchisees can choose among suppliers. Some Marriott hotels have also installed Tesla Superchargers, for instance. Others provide discounts off the use of ChargePoint charging stations.

Marriott’s move, detailed here, comes at a time of growing interest in the space. Hilton earlier this month said it intended to install roughly 20,000 Tesla vehicle chargers at 2,000 hotels in North America through next year.

The European Union is on track to ban marketing claims such as “climate neutral” by 2026 that scientifically based certification can’t validate.

Claims such as “carbon neutral,” “environmentally friendly,” and “eco” will require companies to verify their products’ merits through third-party certification schemes. 

Travel companies are among the industries that may be affected by the looming ban. For example, airlines may need to change booking interfaces that offer “climate-neutral” flights in exchange for buying carbon offsets supporting projects that lack credibility.

The rules okayed on Wednesday still need formal approval from the European Union parliament and its member states — expected in November. But it would be procedurally rare for the rules to be denied.

The move came on the same day United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “humanity has opened the gates to hell” in its failure to stop rising carbon emissions and a forecasted increase in extreme weather.

CDS Groupe, a hotel booking platform for business travel, is expanding into the German market through an acquisition. 

The France-based company said this week that it has acquired Corporate Rates Club, the business travel segment of TourisMarketing Service GmbH. 

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Corporate Rates Club will continue to operate independently with its full staff,  CDS Groupe said. The CRC tool is available through a customized online booking portal or through integrating its hotel offerings into a third-party online booking engine. 

The deal is part of what CDS Groupe says is a plan for international growth.

The company in 2022 acquired Rydoo Travel, an online booking tool, from Marlin Equity. 

The combined company said it completes about €800 million annually in hotel bookings on behalf of its clients, which include corporations and business travel agents. The acquisitions have also allowed the buyer to expand its portfolio of contracts with hotels. 

The company now has 300 employees in France, Italy, Poland, Germany and Croatia.

CDS Groupe was founded in 2001 and is managed by founding shareholder Ziad Minkara.

Selina, a hotel and experiences brand focused on youth travelers, said on Wednesday that its financial metrics were trending in the right direction as it reported earnings results.

In the second quarter, the company generated $52.5 million in revenue, a bump of 15.9% year-over-year. Factors included higher occupancy rates, reductions in corporate overhead, and essentially higher revenue per customer.

The company also narrowed its losses. It reported $700,000 in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, compared to a $5.8 million loss in the same period a year ago.

Selina said it was “aggressively executing a comprehensive real estate portfolio optimization plan” that “includes renegotiating all leases through abatements, deferrals, and terminations.”

In the quarter, the company also collected $10 million as the first phase of a planned strategic investment of up to $50 million led by Global University Systems (GUS), which runs for-profit universities. It also drew $10 million under its $50 million credit facility with Latin America’s Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Selina’s stock price dipped below $1 last month, where it has remained. If Selina’s stock remains below $1 for about a month, the Nasdaq exchange will issue a notice of a plan to delist the shares from trading. Selina will then have 180 days to push the value of shares higher.

The company aims to report a continued upward trend, which could appeal to investors.

“Selina continues to focus on three key strategic areas: improving cash flow, advancing toward profitability, and building our brand,” said Rafael Museri, co-founder and CEO, in a statement.

From today’s Daily Lodging Report newsletter: Nikkei Asia published an article on Hilton planning to expand its luxury offerings in Asia. Hilton will be bringing its Waldorf Astoria brand to Malaysia, Vietnam, India, and other countries for the first time as part of its plans to open 25 new luxury hotels in the Asia Pacific region over the next few years. That’s up from the 33 luxury hotels it currently runs in the Asia Pacific.

In 2027, Hilton will open India’s first Waldorf in Jaipur, the capital of the state of Rajasthan. Hilton has a management agreement with the Dangayach Group, which will own the hotel.

Hilton is also bringing Waldorfs to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Sydney, Australia. In China, Hilton will add its top-of-the-range hotels in Xi’an and Shanghai, while Japan’s first Waldorf will open in Osaka in 2025, followed by Tokyo in 2026.

JLL estimates that the Asia Pacific region has 560,000 luxury hotel rooms, a number that is expected to increase by 90,000 in 10 years.

See Skift’s story on Hilton’s Asia Pacific expansion for context.

Travelers United’s choice to sue Hyatt over its “junk fee” practices fits into a broader storyline about travel junk fees being in the limelight ever since President Joe Biden referred to travel fees in his 2023 State of the Union address.

Travelers United filed the case in Washington, D.C., whose laws require transparent upfront pricing.

The lawsuit notes that “in or around August 2023” Hyatt began advertising accurate pricing information to consumers looking to book a hotel room. On Hyatt.com today, in Skift’s tests, the site displays rates plus resort fees upfront on a traveler’s first search. Hyatt appears to have changed its site to more transparently present resort fees within the past month or so.

But the advocacy group wants Hyatt to pay for the time it didn’t disclose resort fees upfront.

“Since at least 2020, Hyatt has been systemically cheating consumers out of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars each year by falsely advertising its hotel room rates,” the lawsuit claims (embedded below).

We asked Hyatt for a comment yesterday, but haven’t received a response.

Travel commentator Gary Leff blogged that “This is an industry-wide problem, not a Hyatt problem.”

Lauren Wolfe of Travelers United said yesterday the advocacy group plans to file similar lawsuits against other hotel groups.

Yet broadly, some consumers seem to take the the industry practice of drip pricing in stride. One study found that guests dropped their online ratings by only a small percentage after they faced “surprise” fees and booked anyway.

U.S. hotel developers have more projects for extended-stay properties than any other type of hotel, whether measured by number of projects or room count, according to new data.

In the second quarter, developers expanded their pipeline of extended-stay projects by 18% year-over-year to 2,083, said Lodging Econometrics, which collects and studies hotel development.

The extended-stay category had growth outpacing lifestyle, soft-branded, traditional limited-service, and generic full-service properties, as measured by property count and room count. Lodging Econometrics created this chart to illustrate:

One caveat: A segment that was hard to count because it’s so small was independent boutiques.

For independent boutiques only, CoStar’s STR counts 4,227 rooms in construction, with 2,338 rooms projected to open in 2023. That’s a 2.8% year-over-year growth in supply. There are only 16,565 rooms in the indie boutique pipeline.

Accor said on Monday that it had named Gilda Perez-Alvarado as its group chief strategy officer in charge of overseeing global strategy, relations with hotel owners, and strategic partnerships.

Since 2004, Perez-Alvarado has been at the hotel brokerage firm JLL Hotels & Hospitality, working her way up to become its Global CEO. She’s intimately familiar with the sector’s biggest owners and investors, such as sovereign wealth funds, private equity, global brands, family offices, and ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

Perez-Alvarado has spoken about real estate and capital markets at multiple industry events, including at Skift’s Future of Lodging Forum. She will start her new role on October 1, becoming a member of Accor’s management board.