The elephant in the room

Madrid (February 3, 2023). The next few years will not be kind to hotel investors, that much is clear. This was already apparent from the opening statements made by the experts in the first round of discussions at the AOHIS Investors Conference in Madrid in mid-January. Yet there's one thing that owners and investors fear more than increased energy and labour costs, more even than inflation and higher capital costs. And that's the ESG criteria. They are the elephant in the room.

Editorial: Straightforward fickle questionable

Dear Insiders,

On Wednesday, Dorint Hotels opened its 66th hotel in Garching near Munich, batting away 20 competitors in order to do so. Good locations are in demand, and this location in the middle of the business park still has a special charm. And despite the crisis, it's a 4-star full-service hotel with conference rooms. "We're all glad we didn't decide to move away from meetings and conferences," CEO Jörg Böckeler and COO Bettina Schütt both affirm in a conversation with us afterwards. In large part, business is back. And this is also visible at Dorint which is able to show significant growth rates across all KPIs.

Everyone in the industry knows how much the German hotel group fought its way to the top before corona. All the more positive that, behind the scenes, it was able to take full advantage of the pandemic lockdowns: It replaced systems, optimized concepts and initiated new motivation programmes for employees. It lost fewer employees than the national average. During the pandemic, the management team took a closer look at many corners of the company, drew positives from the crisis and straightened its path.

In Austria, the migrant-employee issue is turning into a game of political poker between the parties, as our colleague Fred Fettner witnessed live at the annual ÖHV meeting in Salzburg last week. What I always like about Austrian Hotel Association: It constantly and with great relish manages to challenge politicians because it always seeks the best for its industry. And it even likes to talk about it publicly. Hard to believe.

That communication helps to check one's own position and to get a sense of one's own activities measured against the competition. This became clear during the exchange of views at the AOHIS investors conference in Madrid, where we were also a media partner. And so today I again summarise statements from two talk rounds on the perennial issue of ESG. And on that topic: Investors have actually admitted that ESG is primarily a real estate issue, not an operator issue. You can find the article on our home page, accessible to everyone.

At the moment, China continues to amaze us. After the government banned its investors from investing in the West as recently as the end of 2022, the exact opposite is now the case again. They have the western hotel industry firmly in their sights once more!

The Swiss SV Hotel Group is also focussed on expansion but changes direction. It dilutes its absolutely unique, award-winning Stay Kooook serviced apartment concept to do so. This is now available not only with studio, kitchenette and movable partition, but also as a simple room product with a sink in the room. For me, this is a difficult decision to understand.

The ITB Convention programme (reduced to "tracks", or so they're called) has now slowly made its way online, but I for one still have no idea what awaits us in Berlin this year. The information is certainly very sparse.

We conclude this week again with interesting market news and personnel movements. Oh yes, there is one news item we are not bringing you today: the one about B&B Hotels' "best business year in history". The company cannot substantiate this claim with clear facts - and does not want to, even when asked. I will spare you this hot air.

Yours, Maria Pütz-Willems
editor-in-chief

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