News and notes from around the interweb:
- DeltaPetTransit.com isn’t really a Delta airlines website despite showing their logo, planes, and telling the airline’s history it’s a way to scam people apparently, and Delta is suing its unknown owners.
- Seven Things Oscar Munoz Sees Wrong With United’s Operation
- The owners of the Intercontinental Times Square don’t want to be an Intercontinental anymore, 7 years into a 40 year management contract. IHG Hotels is suing.
Intercontinental Times Square - My Conde’ Nast Traveler prediction, how’d I do?
In December of last year, we asked our travel specialists how travel might change in 2017—and many of them predicted that tourism to the U.S. would drop. “At a top level, President Trump ran on limiting the movement of people and goods. That’s not good for travel. In the short-term the world sees the U.S. as less open to tourism and immigration,” Gary Leff of Book Your Award, an award booking service, told Traveler.
Leff wasn’t far off. This week, the U.S. Department of Commerce released data from the first quarter of 2017 showing that between January and March, 697,791 fewer foreign travelers visited the U.S., a 4.2 percent drop from last year.
- Interesting, from my Facebook feed:
I would suggest that the IC Times Square has never been a real IC anyway. They are a typical business hotel that cannot compare in the least to the ICs in Paris and London.
And in regard to the drop in foreign tourism, we operate a hospitality business in Florida and I can confirm that foreign travelers are coming in much fewer numbers. Although our total number of bookings are about 7% higher than last year, our average stay length is about 15% shorter as foreign guests, who stay longer are being replaced by short stay American guests, cutting our revenue by nearly 10% in the process. I would guess that the drop in foreign visitors will get worse in the second and subsequent quarters as the visits planned prior to the election and inauguration continue to drop out of the system. I hope that a whole lot of coal mines are opened, because if the US loses 10% of the tourism industry, there will be a lot of unemployed people to work in them.