Daniel Johnson, CHA, serves as a hotel analyst for Travel Channel’s Hotel Impossible and is vice president of operations for Argeo Hospitality. Here, he sits down with LODGING to answer one of the most pressing issues he believes hoteliers face.
Baby boomers are retiring, and millennials are the next largest travel segment. Do their shifting desires spell doom for old brands?
Hotels, inns, or some variation of the lodging industry have been around since modern mankind started migrating from one place to another. The Hoshi Ryokan, for example, is a hotel in Komatsu, Japan, in operation since around the year 718. Properties like that are unlikely to be swayed by changes in traveler demographic types, but they are few and far between. A single urban property built in a major city and named after its founder, think Hilton or Day, soon gave way to rapid expansion of franchised chains blooming with the expansion of the highway system from one town to another. Changes were driven by the needs of the traveler such as going from manual keys to electronic locks to shifting from building en masse then abandoning exterior corridors as preferences changed. All along, branded hotels have essentially remained the same but now have become “legacy” properties. The danger is that large generational shifts such as the one hotels now face often change the way we cater to the needs of the new traveling bloc. Millennials, for example, tend to stay in newer facilities that match their desires: ease of operation, technology, connectivity, social spaces, etc. Legacy brands that don’t adapt may find an abandonment factor impacting their future. Established brands are banking that they can straddle the needs of the outgoing older generation while using the present to adapt in order to appeal to the next. Will there be consolidations? Will some brands disappear? Perhaps the Hoshi Ryokan will be the one to ask one day.
