Hotels and other travel companies offered a positive outlook in their quarterly results this week, citing rising vaccination rates and falling COVID-19 cases in the United States after the winter surge of the Omicron variant. .
Countries are also lifting travel restrictions, with Canada set to facilitate the entry of fully immunized international travelers from February 28.
Marriott International Inc and Airbnb Inc’s latest quarterly results beat Wall Exchange estimates, while Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc’s revenue nearly doubled.
On Tuesday, Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano told investors that group cancellations increased late last year and this year due to Omicron. Today, cancellations have slowed and new group bookings are gaining ground.
Mr Capuano cited a Salesforce New York meeting last week as evidence of strong demand for group bookings in the US as Omicron cases drop. The meeting involved 25,000 hotel nights at 11 Marriott properties.
Wynn Resorts CEO Craig Billings said Tuesday that guests at his Las Vegas resort are “spending hard again.”
“2021 has been the year of recovery, and 2022 will outlast COVID and become a year of strong growth for the industry,” said Jamie Lane, vice president of research at vacation rental research firm AirDNA.
In January, AirDNA recorded about 58,000 new short-term rentals in the United States, the most additions since the pandemic began, and that number is growing daily, Lane said. AirDNA data also shows a 35% increase in short-term rental nights booked in the United States in January 2022 compared to the same period in 2019, and a 12% increase compared to 2019 globally.
Omicron-related disruptions to Hilton’s business bookings were largely contained in the first quarter of 2022, with most events rescheduled later in the year, Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta told investors. The hotel company expects group bookings to pick up during the rest of 2022.
Similarly, online travel agency Expedia Inc. said last week that bookings had “rebounded strongly” since the Omicron outbreak.
LONGER STAYS
As many workers embrace the flexibility that comes with permanent remote work, Airbnb said people using its short-term rental site booked longer stays in the quarter just ended.
About half of the nights booked in the fourth quarter were for stays of a week or more, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told investors during the earnings conference call on Tuesday.
“People spread out into thousands of cities, staying for weeks, months or even entire seasons at a time,” Chesky said. “People are less tied to a desk, so they can now live anywhere.”
Erin Francis-Cummings, CEO of travel market research firm Destination Analysts, said the upbeat outlook for travel is not “a short-term blip”, adding that the shift to longer stays is likely to continue. .
She warned, however, that future variants and sprouts of COVID could cloud the outlook, if only temporarily.