My junior year of high school was notable for two things: 1) My homecoming date bailed on me at the last minute citing a “stomach bug.” 2) Our basketball team, for which I was a role-playing point guard, ended the season 2-18. It’s point No. 2 that this column will focus on, not my—to this day—dismay and puzzlement over Sarah’s (last name withheld to protect the identity of said heartbreaking hellcat) supposed ailment.
I’m over it—really. Basketball? Well, that is another thing altogether. It’s never a good season when you lose 16 more games than you win. After the season, our coach euphemistically asked me not to rejoin the team the following year by, instead, “focusing on baseball.” (I was the starting second baseman on varsity and honorable mention All-County my junior year—oddly not selected my senior year when I had a higher batting average. I’m not sour.)
What I do recall from that sorry season was how the cheerleaders—regardless of how badly we were being beaten—never wavered in their support for us. Up 20 or down 20, they were always full-throated in support, enthusiastically waving their pompoms like they were signaling home a F-14 onto the deck of an aircraft carrier.
Those earnest cheerleaders’ unrestrained enthusiasm popped into my head while I attended The Lodging Conference, in September, in Phoenix. Only this time, instead of skirts and bows, it was button downs and blazers. There was another type of cheerleader sitting on panels and traversing the halls of the JW Marriott Desert Ridge in Phoenix: hotel brand executives. They are a sprightly bunch, always full of cheer no matter the circumstances. As I mentioned on a recent podcast, the dragons from “Game of Thrones” could be spewing down hellfire from the clouds above, but hotel brand execs would still feel Pollyannaish about the state of the hotel industry.
This optimism is injected into their bloodstream once they cross the threshold of a lodging company’s door and it was on full display during The Lodging Conference. One brand executive told me she was “super positive.” Meanwhile, a hotel owner said he was “super cautious.”
Therein lies the difference: God love them, but hotel brands are conditioned to put on a happy face, no matter the circumstance. It’s wired in them to promote and promulgate positivity. Brand business is built on the backs of owners and convincing them to build hotels with their flags. The more growth, the more fees brands derive.
Hearing good news is not necessarily a bad thing (people tend to like good news), but it can complicate matters about how things really are. The higher cost of debt is putting some pause on new hotel development and the fact of the matter is that Wall Street judges lodging companies on their ability to multiply, better known as net unit growth. At the end of the day, if your NUG dries up, so does your stock price.
On the other hand, hotel owners are always going to tell it like it is because, at the end of the day, they are the ones holding the bag. They own the asset and own the risk. And that is why you can always expect an unvarnished opinion on how things are really going.
When the chips are down and your team is down by 20, cheerleaders will still try and buoy your spirits. But it’s your coach who is going to give you the truth: you stink.