Insider

The crunch of data

The hotel sector loves a gossip. Oh how it loves to gossip and the horror of the current situation is that gossiping has been horribly restricted. The dark corners of the Marlene Bar are silent, with whispers unwhispered and speculation unfloated. For a market which runs on the buzz of a rumour spread over a gin, the brain feels as though its ears have been cut off.

There has not been a complete cessation of chat, of course, we’re human after all, but something about the times in which we live and the WhatsApp by which we ponder lends itself to Chinese Whispers and after a while the Did You Hear That becomes so outlandish that anything seems possible. Even Accor, Citroën and JCDecaux preparing to unveil “an autonomous urban mobility solution”

So it was with a breath of sanity that results season kicked off this week and we got a look under the hood to see who was being held together by elastic bands and repurposed stockings.

So far the message has been the same: the domestic leisure market was good to us over the summer but September is looking like less fun than we’d hoped. Various companies stuck to various themes: for IHG the pace of recovery was described as “muted”, at Accor the call was for “discipline” and at Pandox it was all about being “in the hands of government restrictions”.

We can expect to hear more of the same from Marriott International, Hilton, Whitbread et al in the coming weeks, with scant mention of the business market and some light muttering about vaccines. Will we see Hilton’s Chris Nassetta repeat August’s line about seeing a vaccine “in the fall”? One suspects not, although we also look to his thoughts about the US election, which could well lead to the country finding itself under more restrictions than it has seen thus far, depending on who makes it past the ballot box.

So we are now in the land of fact, for a couple of weeks at least, where all eyes are on cash burn and liquidity and how long the big, global operators can wait this out, because make no mistake, times are rubbish and going rubbisher for those companies who saw fit to sale-and-leaseback themselves away from the family silver and go asset light. When Spring springs, expect the brands to have shuffled after a few more months of very few fees indeed. Accor, with its interest in AccorInvest, remains a special case and it will be hoping to resolve what looks to be a painful situation before Christmas without too much of a hit on its own €4bn.

One brand which may well do better than previously suspected is Travelodge, where even the rumour mill didn’t see Secure Income Reit pulling the sale of its hotels portfolio, where the purchase by Aroundtown for a rumoured £380m was thought to have been signed and sealed. Indeed, speculation had already moved on to what brand it might reflag to. 

It was quite a change in opinion for SIR, which flipped from grumping about the brand not engaging properly and making threatening noises about lawyers to describing Travelodge as  “one of the best in class operators in the low-cost hotel sector”. Unless its opinion of the rest of the low-cost hotel sector is ruinously low, one can only imagine that Travelodge has shown it a golden ankle in recent days.

Where will this leave the Travelodge landlords making decisions of their own about operators in the low-cost hotel sector will be seen later this year. Travelodge may have sweetened the deal with SIR with a view to the reflected glow this will have given. Until November we have only the gossip to sustain us.