CEOs Tell Trump That Hotel Industry Situation Is Dire

President Trump on Tuesday met with leaders from the travel, tourism and hospitality industries and heard stark talk about the future of the sector in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I personally lived through many crisis, starting with the S&L, the 9/11 crisis, the Great Recession. I’ve been doing this for 35 years. Never seen anything like it,” Hilton Hotels CEO Chris Nasetta said of the global outbreak.

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Nasetta said it was just a few days, maybe a week, before Hilton will be running at just 10 to 15 percent occupancy around the world.

“For the first time in 100 years — Hilton has been around 100 years — we’ve never closed a hotel that wasn’t going to be demolished for rebuilding. The bulk of our hotels in the major cities are closing, as we speak,” Nasetta said.

Like airlines, the hotel industry is likely going to need a government bailout or low-interest loans. Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, told Trump that “The numbers are $355 billion is what we’re going to lose, 4.6 million employees will be out of work, and we’re predicting unemployment will go to 6.3 percent. So, it’s now — it’s serious.”

“No, I know,” Trump replied. “We’ll work on it.”

Arne Sorenson, CEO of Marriott said that in the last couple of days, “when you look at decline in reservations and in cancellations, the total is negative.”

Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Hyatt Hotels, talked about the domino effect – or the ecosystem – of what the virus has done.

“We’ve been tracking major cancellations,” he said, not including the loss of business from the suspension of business by the major sports leagues, many of which use Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott to stay while on the road. “When we look at just the other meetings that have been canceled, they involve attendees of over 1.5 million people. So when you think about the ecosystem impact — it’s major convention markets where those attendees are not showing up. So they’re not traveling on airplanes, but they’re not staying in our hotels. They’re also not going out to restaurants. And so the collective impact is quite significant. I think the key issue that I would leave you with is that the urgency is very high because, day by day, the occupancy rates have dropped precipitously. So now we are seeing occupancies below 10 percent, in the single digits, for the vast majority of our hotels — whereas a week ago, they were 20, 30 points higher than that. It’s happened very rapidly.”