Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal has a front page (personal section) article with a headline that screams “Hotel Rates Soar Over the Holidays”. The opening line (salvo) gives more than an indication of the author’s leanings – “While this is the season of giving, higher-end hotels aren’t giving travelers a break from rising rates”. Any amount of trawling the net is unlikely to turn up an article of charity towards hotels in the extreme economic conditions lthat prevailed post 9/11 or in the run up to the Iraq war circa March 2003 – so what sense does it make for hotels to be giving all travelers a “break”? Obviously, hotels live through economic cycles that some times are real busts as in the recent past. And yet the evidently economically illiterate reporter of the Wall Street Journal reports it as a “trend of ever-increasing room prices, which began in 2004, is continuing through the holiday season”.
With a significant development pipeline combined with the natural ebb and flow of the economy the odds of this robust aspect of the economic cycle enduring for “ever” are about as great as finding the Lochness monster.