PRODUCT NEWS
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| Gap between luxury and budget hotels widening |
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| 16 Jun 2014 . BY Helen Andrews |
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| Helipads, individual street entrances to hotel suites and private elevators are all examples of elite hotel facilities / Shutterstock / Duc Dao |
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The gap between luxury hotels and more financially-conscious accommodation facilities is widening according to a report by The Associated Press/ABC News.
High-end hotels are rolling out increasingly extravagant offerings to satisfy the most affluent guests, such as helipads, suites with their own postal codes and extremely short notice bookings.
“High-end travel in the air, on the sea and on land has never been more robust,” Steve Carvell, associate dean at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration told The AP. “There are more people with more concentrated wealth.”
Since 2009, hotel spending by the wealthiest 20 per cent of Americans has risen by approximately six per cent according to inflation-adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The middle 20 per cent are still spending nearly three per cent less.
Middle-income vacationers, however, are fuelling the growth of ‘limited service’ lodgings – those which include free Wi-Fi and breakfast but without a bellman, concierge or restaurants.
Savings are being made by this market segment by using popular online sites such as Airbnb that arrange for people to rent rooms or apartments. Since Airbnb’s founding in 2008, the number of listed accommodations has soared to 550,000 – not far below Hilton’s 685,000 rooms worldwide.
Airbnb could be cutting into budget hotels’ revenue, according to the report because its hosts can charge less than hotels as they typically don’t pay accommodation taxes of meet safety or disability regulations.
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