Corporate travel prices next year will increase in most supplier categories, Carlson Wagonlit Travel said in its annual forecast. U.S. hotel rates are projected to grow more than 7.4% and domestic economy airfares increases are expected to be up to 5%, according to a story from Business Travel News.
The travel management company said higher demand, sustained capacity discipline and anticipated increases in fuel costs would combine next year to put further upward pressure on airfares, which have continued to firm from the lows of the past year.
CWT North America president Jack O'Neill said during the first six months of this year the travel management company handled more than 13% more transactions than in the same period in 2009.
"These numbers reflect an improving picture for the economy around the globe and, depending on our clients' sector of business, a trend toward 'back to normal,'" he said in a letter to clients. "Business travel has not yet returned to pre-recessionary levels and it remains to be seen whether it ever will."
Bummer.
Jack DeBoer, chairman of Value Place and father of the hotel industry’s extended-stay segment, spoke of hookers, drugs, dirty carpet and more during a break at the ninth annual Southern Lodging Summit @ Memphis, where he also gave a luncheon keynote address.
“Hotel developers find it rather difficult to operate a property that doesn’t have a 24/7 front desk, to operate a property that doesn’t have housekeeping every day, to operate a property that doesn’t have free breakfast,” DeBoer said. “They find it difficult to operate a property that doesn’t have frills. And they find it difficult to operate a property that they have 4.5 (full-time employees). That’s the secret. The secret sauce of Value Place is not the building; it’s the operating model.”
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Existing-home sales in the United States dropped to their lowest level in 15 years in July as inventories soared, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Home resales dropped a record 27.2%—nearly twice as much as analysts had expected, according to The Wall Street Journal—to an annual rate of 3.83 million. Meanwhile, inventories rose to 12.5 months from 8.9 months in June, pressuring already depressed home prices. Inventories are at their highest level in more than a decade, the Journal reported.
Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited, which owns and manages the Pensinsula group of hotels, released interim results for the first half of 2010.
Managing director and CEO Clement K.M. Kwok said, “The hotels division recorded a 13% increase in revenue compared with the first half of 2009, while occupancies at all of the Peninsula hotels improved as compared to last year.”
The company noted the Peninsula Shanghai grand opening on 18 March 2010, which marked the return of HSH to one of its founding cities after an absence of 55 years. The grand opening of the Arcade within The Peninsula Shanghai was held 1 July.
The Peninsula Paris project made steady progress in the first half of the year, and the hotel is expected to open in 2012.
The IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report reported 4,396 new IT security vulnerabilities were documented by the X-Force Research and Development team in the first half of 2010, a 36% increase over the same time period last year.
According to the report, Web application vulnerabilities continued to be the leading threat, accounting for more than half of all public disclosures. In addition, covert attacks increased in complexity hidden within JavaScript and PDFs, while cloud computing and virtualization were noted as key future security topics for enterprise organizations.
Web application vulnerabilities have surpassed all other threats to account for 55% of all disclosures. While Web application vulnerabilities continue to climb at a steady rate, these figures may only represent the tip of the iceberg of total Web application vulnerabilities that exist, as they do not include custom-developed Web applications that can also introduce vulnerabilities.
Compiled by Stacey Higgins.
