This Is What The Future Of Hotels Looks Like. Get Ready For Shrink Wrap And “Health

The last time I went to Las Vegas, I dropped $120 for a 1600 square foot two-bedroom corner suite with a wrap-around travertine balcony at a shiny new casino hotel with three marbled jacuzzi tubs and four flat HD screen TVs.

At guest registration, my wife and I waited an hour to check in. We stood in line another 25 minutes for an elevator, packed into a narrow lobby within inches of hundreds of other guests wheezing through clouds of Parliament smoke.

My wife, already exhausted from the 5-hour economy full flight in, was seething. I was still congratulating myself on scoring a screaming hot deal on the Strip. Order some in-room dining with a bottle of wine. A little turn down service from housekeeping. An hour massage at the spa in the morning. She’ll be fine.

Three years later, midstream COVID-19, nothing in hospitality is fine.

Hotels are hemorrhaging business—second only to the airlines. As of late April, 80% of hotel rooms in America were empty. No one’s traveling. Cancellations are staggering. Huge swathes of staff—from housekeeping and food and beverage, to bellhops, reservationists, and valet—have been furloughed or sacked altogether.

Financially, the coronavirus contraction has sent the lodging sector overall into a short-term death spiral.

Cash-strapped boutiques are teetering on bankruptcy, while short-term rental start-ups are slashing rates by 55% or more just to pay leases and utilities. Greece is predicting that 65% of its hotels could go out of business entirely. Meanwhile multinationals like Marriott and Hilton are hoarding cash on hand and girding for a slow recovery while business travel remains locked down and summer travel plans grind to a halt.

These are big numbers. Overall, lodging contributes nearly $600 billion to U.S. GDP and supports over 1 in 25 jobs in America.  It’s a disaster. Everyone in the industry knows it. And there’s still no end in sight.

But when travel returns—and it will because it has to—what does the new hotel “normal” look like? For the lobbies, the bars, roof top pools, room service, housekeeping, luggage handling, valet parking, the gyms, the spas, and breakfast buffets?

Airlines just get people places. Hotels are where millions of people actually live every day when they’re away from home on business or traveling with their families.

So what now?

The reality is that no one knows just yet. The answers coming from the industry’s highest levels are still mostly speculation. Hotels, especially big, luxury, convention center, resort-style ones, take years to envision, design, and build. No one wants to make panicked decisions three months into a pandemic with an unknown endgame, because…