Loews Hotels & Co., like virtually every hospitality player across the globe, has been significantly impacted by the pandemic. The company, which has 27 properties across the U.S. and Canada, has reopened the vast majority of its portfolio, though select locations in markets like New York, Los Angeles and Orlando remain shuttered for the time being. Hotels editor Christina Jelski recently touched base with Alex Tisch, who was appointed president in mid-September, to get an update on the group's Covid-19 recovery strategy and brand expansion.
Alex Tisch
Q: What's your big-picture outlook on the recovery front thus far?
A: We agree with most who say that the business and convention business is certainly not a 2020 discussion and probably not one until mid-2021, at least. The good news is that we're seeing decent leisure demand into the fall, albeit the booking window is much shorter. For example, people are deciding to go to a theme park with two weeks' notice or even just one week's notice. But they are still traveling, and frankly, the data we're seeing at our resort destinations has been relatively positive and better than we expected so far.
For our city center hotels, our focus is really on capturing the business that we can in those markets and managing our business to lose the least amount of money possible while we tread along at the bottom.
Q: Do you think business travel will be forever changed once we emerge from the pandemic?
A: My perspective is that, yes, the balance of where people are traveling has shifted significantly now to one side of the barbell, with that side being resort destinations. But at some point, hopefully sooner than later, it will balance back to the middle of the barbell once corporations start traveling. I've been on enough Zoom calls in the past six months to know that Zoom is a fine way to play defense but not offense. And people want to be on the road. They want to be in hotels, and they want to be socializing. We think that when people feel comfortable traveling, specifically in groups, it's going to be a very positive explosion upwards. I just can't tell you when that is.
When I think about ways this pandemic will fundamentally alter certain things, I think more about things we're doing in our hotels like making the [dining process digital]; you can order your food and pay via app. And we're also working on a digital room key and digital check-in, so you can have that touchless customer experience. And these are the types of changes that I think will actually be a positive for the industry in the long term, independent of the pandemic.
Q: Can you provide an update on your newest openings and your expansion plans?
A: Our latest properties, the Live! by Loews -- St. Louis, Missouri and the Loews Kansas City, are new hotel developments that had the unfortunate opening dates of early March and mid-April of 2020, respectively. St. Louis, we were actually able to open prior to the onset of the pandemic, while for Kansas City, we delayed the opening from April 2 to June 2.
Prior to Covid, we had a pretty big pipeline. In addition to St. Louis and Kansas City, we had developments planned for Arlington, Texas, and for around 2,000 keys in Orlando [with Universal's Endless Summer Resort -- Dockside Inn and Suites]. And all those hotels are, for the larger part, already completed. Now, we're starting to see if there are any opportunistic things we can do during this downturn to add newer development projects to our pipeline. We want to make a few concentrated investments in big hotel developments focused on meetings and events and theme destinations. We think that those are the types of things that are going to create a real long-term value for our shareholders.