Hotels, This is What the Future looks like

Edit Story May 12, 2020,07:00pm EDT This Is What The Future Of Hotels Looks Like. Get Ready For Shrink Wrap And “Health Detectors” Peter Lane Taylor

ContributorOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. ForbesLife 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. High density now means higher risk. Las Vegas Strip, Nevada Getty 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. Today In: ForbesLife

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. PROMOTED If coronavirus can shut down the Greek Island of Santorini it can shut down anything Getty 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? Will we ever be able to do this on vacation at the hotel pool again? Getty 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 betting wrong on two thousand rooms, four pools, nine restaurants is a slow-moving ship that’s hard to right once it has momentum, and could prove financially disastrous if coronavirus is vanquished by a vaccine next year and the world moves on. But what if COVID-19 persists, even mildly, or surges again next winter? The psychological suspicion that everyone around you could make you sick will likely linger far longer than the virus itself—and have a much larger impact on what people expect from hotels to feel confident that their health and safety are being respected and protected. It’s a moving, mental target everyone in hospitality is scrambling to figure it out right now. Pack 'em in and get 'em paying. Photographer: Tim Boyle/Bloomberg BLOOMBERG NEWS From a density standpoint, most hotels’ basic economic model isn’t much different than a cruise ship’s, where the pandemic first began spreading globally: move as many bodies in and out as quickly and frequently as possible. One of the formula’s essential metrics is occupancy %, or more accurately, maximizing the number of people paying for something per square foot. This means that constant, close interpersonal contact is an economic necessity for virtually every hotel to turn a profit—in the elevators, in the pool, at the bar, at the brunch buffet, the gift shop, the concierge desk and so on. Which is precisely the hotel industry’s most vexing paradox right now. When your business is all about service, and the people who deliver it, how do you execute a socially distanced variation on that model during and after a pandemic? Alan Fuerstman, founder and CEO of Montage Hotels, started working as a doorman for Marriott when he ... [+] was 18 Courtesy of Montage International “Consumer confidence is our biggest challenge right now as an industry,” says Montage founder Alan Fuerstman. “There are so many things that go on inside a hotel that guests never see or thought about before. Now we have to give them the confidence that we can do all of those same things while ensuring their health and safety and not compromising the experience they came to us for in the first place.” Few people understand the complexity of that proposition better than Fuerstman, who got his start in the hotel business when he was 18 working as a doorman at a Marriott in Saddlebrook, NJ, humping luggage and cleaning snow off windshields in winter. Fuerstman worked his way up from there the old school way, learning hospitality’s trenches by doing it instead of getting a fancy degree. From doorman he became a bellman, and after college helped open a new Marriott resort in Rancho Mirage, CA, first as a front desk manager, then overseeing housekeeping operations. A few years later, Fuerstman was recruited as general manager of a new Arizona resort where he quickly was promoted to managing director, running a $500 million show. That’s when it hit him that he could be doing his own thing, and Fuerstman founded Montage Hotels in 2002. Montage Deer Valley, Part City, UT Blake Marvin / HKS, Inc. 18 years later, Fuerstman now runs seven exclusive luxury resorts and hotels and a $3 billion a year brand, Montage International, that also includes a luxury residential real estate component built into each property, including locations like Laguna Beach, Los Cabos, Deer Valley, UT, and Palmetto Bluff, SC. When COVID-19 hit in March, Fuerstman also had another seven new hotels in design or under construction, including Montage Healdsburg in Sonoma Valley and Montage Big Sky in Montana along with five new hotels for Fuerstman’s new brand Pendry spearheaded by his son Michael. Like thousands of other companies riding a strong economy, low interest rates, and a record stock market over the past several years, the pandemic caught Fuerstman right in the middle of a major expansion at the worst possible time. The pool at Montage Laguna Beach. Lots of space to social distance Courtesy of Montage Hotels Thursday March 19th, the day Governor Gavin Newsom shut California down, was when it all hit home. Zoom triage for Fuerstman and his management team began minutes later—“thousands of them, it felt like, every day”, recalls Fuerstman. Everyone was involved—general managers, operations executives, PR and communications, in-house architects, real estate—to get a drone’s eye view of what the company needed to do immediately, hour-by-hour. At the time, Montage’s properties were running at 80% occupancy, amounting to over 5,000 guests spread across four states and one property in Mexico who were directly at risk of a surging pandemic.   “The first few weeks were very hectic,” Fuerstman admits. “The industry as a whole had never seen anything like this happen. We all had to adapt quickly.” A few days later, Fuerstman decided to temporarily shut Montage and Pendry down altogether except for the residents who were sheltering in place. That meant, among other things, refunding and moving thousands of upcoming reservations to later in the summer or fall. A Pendry interior courtyard with tons of room to widen furniture layouts and spread our Courtesy of Pendry The next thing Fuerstman’s teams they knew they had to do was solve for sanitization, which, for someone steeped in operations, was easier than Fuerstman thought. Hospitals for years have been borrowing designs from hospitality to create more welcoming patient experiences, Fuerstman tells me. But when COVID-19 hit that information immediately began to flow in the other direction, with hospitality quickly adopting protocols from America’s healthcare systems that have been deployed for decades to protect patients and staff from infections. “People always have had high expectations of cleanliness from luxury hotels,” says Fuerstman, “Now it’s just going to get a little higher. And there’s a ton we can learn from hospitals. Hand sanitizers located throughout our hotels, hand washing stations for staff, ultraviolet light and disinfecting wands for cleaning public spaces quickly, more anti-microbial surfaces in our lobbies and rooms. All of a sudden this is all on the table.” Less vertical, more horizontal translates into more square footage to keep people safely distanced Courtesy of Bettie Grace Miner/Montage Hotels On social distancing, Montage fortunately was already pandemically prepared by design. Low-rise resorts and hotels in non-urban areas, which comprise all of the company’s properties, are infectiously predisposed to encourage isolation between people compared to high-rise downtown hotels where hundreds of guests are stacked 250’ vertically on top of each other connected by a single concrete lift shaft. More open space means more horizontal square footage, ergo more natural distancing. “As a brand, and based on how we’ve designed our properties, we have more inherent space to spread out.” says Fuerstman of Montage properties like Palmetto Bluff and Deer Valley, which are built into thousands of acres of public and private open space. “So we can put additional outdoor restaurant seating in a garden or on the lawn around the pool. We can configure the lobby furniture farther apart and still have it feel like a common place to gather. Space needs to be deconstructed and re-connected in new ways more than ever right now.” Smart home technology now more than ever means 'no touch' Getty Technology also factors heavily into Montage’s immediate and longer-term response to COVID-19. But Fuerstman’s not convinced that it’s a post-corona panacea just yet. He sees technology less as a Hail Mary to stem the short-term mayhem, and more as a new brand standard to be integrated into Montage and Pendry across the board to plan for future uncertainty, while simultaneously sustaining the personal attention to detail that keeps their guests brand loyal long-term. “A lot of this ‘no-touch’ technology has been around for a while,” says Fuerstman. “It just hasn’t been integrated into hotels. Voice recognition was already moving in the right direction with Alexa and Nest before coronavirus hit. Will coronavius accelerate it now? Probably. But you also can’t automate everything all at once, or some things at all. What’s important is what you do immediately about things like television remote controls and other high-touch surfaces like bathroom faucets for instance? What about ice machines?” Montage Kapalua Bay Courtesy of Barbara Kraft/Montage Hotels Some of the less visible things being discussed by the hotel industry’s major players include more complicated legal and civil liberties questions like mandatory health screenings based on where you flew in from (Who conducts these? What paperwork do you have to sign?), dedicating certain floors to higher risk guests (Doesn’t that violate some fair housing law?), and thermography sensors installed at all building entrances to take guests’ temperatures. These are complex, expensive issues which many hotels don’t have the capital, legal depth, or emotional bandwidth to survive. This is a breaking moment for hospitality, Fuerstman acknowledges. Like many restaurants, a lot of locations won’t reopen. Which is precisely why anticipating what the future of hotels looks like now is so important to get right. The fire pit at Montage Los Cabos Courtesy of Barbara Kraft/Montage Hotels Either way, Fuerstman isn’t pulling the breaks. He and his son are already too invested in Montage and Pendry’s expansion plans, and like so many other hotel brands they already have too many shovels in the ground to turn back now. “We build generational hotels. What happens this year or next year doesn't matter. We’re not slowing down. Hotels still make great economic sense.” More importantly, Fuerstman doesn’t think hospitality is going away any time soon. Nor do any of his fellow hotel whispering tycoons. “I’ve seen what Wynn’s doing. They know what we’re doing. We’re all talking,” Fuerstman says. “We as an industry are collaborating to solve this thing. We have to. The airlines didn’t solve the safety issue post-9/11. The industry solved the issue. That’s so important right now for us.” LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - MARCH 31: An exterior view shows guest rooms at Encore Las Vegas (L) ... [+] illuminated to form the shape of a heart and Wynn Las Vegas with rooms lit up to spell out "#VEGAS STRONG" as both resorts remain closed as a result of the statewide shutdown due to the continuing spread of the coronavirus across the United States on March 31, 2020 in Las Vegas, Nevada. On March 20th, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak ordered a mandatory shutdown of most nonessential businesses in the state until at least April 16th to help combat the spread of the virus. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus (COVID-19) a global pandemic on March 11th. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Getty Images Ultimately, Fuerstman’s short-term view on the pandemic is reassuringly sanguine. Hotels aren’t lines of 0s and 1s. They’re bricks and marble and mahogany and orchids, and essential to the sense of discovery that’s intrinsic to the human experience. And there’s going to be a ton of pent of demand for that once stay-at-home orders are lifted. “It’s not easy to be isolated for this long,” Fuerstman says. “Hotels within driving distance are going to come back a lot sooner. Long distance travel and getting on a plane is going to be the challenge. The bottom line is that safety is the primary issue that we have to solve as a company and as an industry, just like it was after 911, but for a different reason this time. We can do this.” How long “doing this” takes, however, is anyone’s guess. Denniston founder architect Jean-Michel Gathy Courtesy of Denniston Jean-Michel Gathy is kicking back on his living room sofa in his house in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia when I catch up with him at 10:00 pm his time. In a dark blue, short-sleeved shirt with swept, peppered hair, he looks a little like a retired tennis professional who still has millions in the bank. He speaks with an accent only someone who speaks five languages can. If there’s any living architect qualified to speculate authoritatively on what the future of hotels looks like it’s Jean-Michel Gathy, whose design firm Denniston founded in 1983 has virtually every luxury hotel in the world on speed dial. Gathy’s vision and project savvy have produced hundreds of the world’s most elite hotels and hospitality firsts in 32 different countries over 37 years, including for brands like Aman, Four Seasons, Setai, Mandarin, St. Regis, Cheval Blanc, and One&Only. The infinity pool at Capella Sanya. Hainan, China Courtesy of Denniston “This COVID-19 thing is a panic for me, like everyone else,” Gathy begins telling me. “It kills people. It happened really quick. There’s no vaccine. And it’s already having a psychological impact that affects everything else. How people want to travel. What they touch. How much risk is too much. What happens then when this becomes a psychological disease? How do you solve that with design?” It’s an ironic visual metaphor once you get familiar with Gathy’s work. For any architectural student, one of Gathy’s most ionic achievements is the conceptual design for the 3-acre SkyDeck suspended 57 stories on top of Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands’ three glass spires, which has as its centerpiece a 475’ long infinity pool that cantilevers out over the city skyline and is the longest elevated pool in the world. It’s that kind of imagination—and the fact that he’s currently designing the Aman New York City and Four Seasons Bangkok and Tokyo—that drove me to track Gathy down in the first place. The SkyDeck and 475' long infinity pool on top of Marina Bay Sands. Singapore Courtesy of Denniston Gathy’s architecture belies his innately organic, Darwinian view of life. Indelible design that lasts, he explains to me, is efficient and agile yet ornate and elegant because that’s what humans love, like peacocks and Emperor penguins. COVID-19 is yet another step on architecture’s evolutionary journey. “Every crisis changes industry,” Gathy says. “After 9/11 everything changed. The primary issue then was safety. So we changed the cockpit doors on airplanes. We changed the security at the airports. We changed mass transit stations and how we moved around. But the driving criteria was public safety against the threat of terrorism. Now the safety threat is health. So we have to adapt to that now. Hygiene is the new security.” Like Fuerstman, Gathy is quick to point out that building large hotels is like conjuring a small city from thin air, so that adaptation doesn’t happen overnight. Everything in a resort hotel as they come to life is interconnected, purposeful, and progressive. You can’t just call audibles left and right. The best ones take decades to plan and execute—even without major re-imagining. So while everyone seems to agree that COVID-19’s hospitality bomb will be lasting and irreversible, no one actually knows what the new design normal is just yet, not even Gathy. “It takes three, five, six years minimum to build a hotel and a lot changes happen in those years,” Gathy reminds me, “Even when there’s not a global pandemic. Materials change. Lifestyles change. Politics change. Financial environments change. The world changes. And COVID is now one of those changes. I remember in 2008 with the sub-prime crash that jerked the whole world everyone was asking ‘Is this going to change hotels?’, ‘Is this going to change real estate?’ Well of course it is! Two years later everything was different. It’s no different today.” Rendering of the new Four Seasons Bangkok opening in 2021 Courtesy of Denniston The most important question for hotel architects like Gathy right now is what happens next, immediately. What do guests need to trust that hotels can look after them? “You remember 10 years ago when if you wanted to be a go-to architect you had to be a green architect?” Gathy asks me rhetorically. “Well now it’s illegal not to be. I believe that in a matter of one to two years the concept of health will become law for buildings in the exactly the same way. It will be in the materials that you can use and the air and water systems you need to install. But right now if hotels are going to regain the trust of travelers, they have to assure them they’re not putting their health or safety at risk.” No one in the industry believes that this can be accomplished without a massive infusion of new technology, which for Gathy as an architect involves an almost impossible balance between safety, surveillance, design, and disclosure.     “After 9/11,” Gathy reminds me, “We had security at the entrances to all buildings and hotels. You would go through this sometimes secret detector or put your bag through a metal detector to get it screened. I believe you are going to now have the same thing for health. Now they’ll have another machine when you travel—a “health detector”— that will check whether you have signs of COVID-19 or if you have a temperature, or they’ll read your lungs and heart. In my opinion that’s going to be at the entrance of every hotel eventually. Exactly like security for weapons in an airport. Although you won’t see it.” Optimum spacing for social distancing in the looby at Capella Sanya. Hainan, China Courtesy of Denniston Like Fuerstman, the prospect of temperature and vascular scanners at hotel entrances for Gathy brings up complicated questions about privacy and civil liberties and how much power a state or municipal health department, or an insurance company for that matter, ultimately can have. What if you’re identified with an elevated temperature the next time you check into the Four Seasons? What happens then? Does security come out to get you? Are you forced to undergo more rigorous screening behind closed doors before you can begin your vacation? Do you get downgraded to a separate, dedicated COVID-19 floor? Can you be asked to leave? “These are many big questions,” says Gathy. “But the most important one now is the way in which the design industry, the supply industry, and the construction industry can apply new technologies immediately to solve this coronavirus problem,” says Gathy. “This is without doubt the most fundamental thing. And I believe that in a matter of years the industry will have solved COVID-19—just like they did with sustainability.” The well spaced lobby at the new Four Seasons Bangkok opening 2021 Courtesy of Denniston For Gathy, the architect, this involves things like anti-microbial surfacing for everything from lobbies, to side tables, to the restaurant back of house, self check-in kiosks, and limits on how many people can ride in an elevator. There will be auto-cleaning metals in the bathrooms and special resins on the floors and walls that viruses cannot stick to and survive on, like lotus flowers. Special invisible plastics and removable films will cover TV remote controls, faucets, showerheads, and door handles. Air and water delivery systems will be filtered and purified. Basic rooms will give way to more studios and suites with kitchens and laundry to reduce housekeeping and room service interactions. Within 5 years, Gathy predicts that all of these things will be standard in the hotel industry, especially at the highest end. He makes a compelling case. But when does a hotel start feeling like a hospital, I ask?   “Never,” Gathy responds. “All of this technology will be invisible and progressive. Do you notice today that the glass in front of your hotel room with the view is triple-panned and energy efficient? Of course you don’t. You see the view. Do you notice that the glass looking out onto the garden is also a solar panel? Do you see it? No. This is the way technology and materials can solve the COVID-19 problem and the panic without compromising the experience and feeling of being at a hotel. It’s about implementation.” Say bye bye to the brunch buffet Getty The one place where Gathy’s optimism gets tricky, he admits, is when it comes to food and beverage, which for many hotels and resorts, like cruise ships, is a cash cow. “The buffet is going to go. Too many things to touch,” Gathy is convinced. “The controls in the kitchen are going to get more stringent, and will have to be totally redesigned. Chefs may have glass between them and the food when they’re cooking, for instance. The space between tables will be changed. There will be more outdoor dining. We are going to have to address materials, food displays, serving, and so on. The ministries of health are going to have huge influence on all of this. But we’ll still have the cigar bar. We’ll still have the lobby bar. It’s going to be very difficult to tell someone that they can’t sit at the hotel bar because of social distancing requirements when they just arrived on a full plane into New York from Paris.” The library at Capella Sanya. Hainan, China Courtesy of Denniston Overall, Gathy’s long-view on hospitality, like Fuerstman’s, is cautiously optimistic. He also sees COVID-19 as an opportunity for the industry that would be tragic to squander. “You know we have an expression in my country,” Gathy tells me (he was actually born in Belgium). “We say in French ‘When construction is doing well all is doing well.’ Because it’s life’s business. So any new material, any new technology is good for the world, for progress, for engineering, for laboratories, for hospitals, for schools, for life. No matter where that comes from or why that may also be tragic. But it’s going to create jobs. It’s going to create new markets and new technologies. All of these things will make things better in the long run. And that is fabulous in my opinion.” Francis Davidson, Sonder's co-founder and CEO Courtesy of Peter Grigsby Photography/Sonder Fabulous isn’t how most hospitality companies would describe their current situation right now. But across the spectrum COVID-19 already is spurning the kind of warp speed pivots and innovation Gathy anticipates. It’s also forcing young companies to grow up fast. Alt-hotel startup Sonder launched in summer 2012 as a side gig for Francis Davidson and Lucas Pellan while they were sophomores at McGill University. That summer they saw an opportunity to re-position student apartments into curated short-term vacation rentals while their friends went home or on summer programs abroad, leaving a huge untapped supply chain with unmet tourism demand. Davidson and Pellan quickly built a website to match vacant student apartments with travelers and they struck pay dirt. The following summer, Davidson was managing hundreds of units across 11 cities and was booking more than $1 million in revenue, hiring housekeeping, valeting cars, building the tech to manage thousands of in-bound reservations, and learning on the fly how to run a virtual hotel. Fully-furnished. Ready for quarantine Courtesy of Sonder Last fall, Sonder raised $60 million in its Series D round, adding to its already impressive venture haul which now totals $345 million. At its current $1.1 billion valuation the start-up is hospitality’s only startup unicorn. Though Sonder doesn’t technically call itself a “hotel” brand in the traditional sense, it’s now a fully-fledged, “next-gen” hospitality powerhouse with over 5,000 “apart-hotel” units in 28 cities across 6 countries totaling $2.3 billion in real estate assets under management, including New York, London, Rome, San Francisco, Miami, Dublin, and Dubai. The company has another 14,000 apartment units currently under lease and scheduled to open over the next year. Sonder’s nowhere near a Hilton or Mariott yet. But Davidson’s not shy about the company’s aspirations to upend the traditional hotel model. At its current pace, it will dwarf other well-known boutique brands like Kimpton and Viceroy that have been around for decades on room count and revenue within in 2-3 years.   Just show up with your bags travel is currently keeping Sonder's units 65% full Courtesy of Sonder All of which means Sonder is no different than any other hotel chain in its exposure to the coronavirus pandemic. Travel’s savage contraction hit Sonder in the gut in March like everyone else, and right in the middle of a massive expansion like Montage. The difference between Sonder and most traditional hotels, however, is that the company already was pre-positioned for the pandemic downturn operationally, technologically, and architecturally. This was one part prescience, two parts attorneys, and mostly good timing. By using multi-family apartment stock as the core of its hospitality supply chain, Sonder already had full kitchens and laundry built into its units before the virus hit, making them innately self-sufficient and ideally suited to millions of pandemic refugees who needed immediate, turnkey places to self-isolate or quarantine away from their families, or suddenly were stuck without housing, while not having to sacrifice the comforts and necessities of home. Full kitchens, laundry, and work spaces make Sonder's units perfect for longer-term stays Courtesy of Sonder Sonder’s light-touch, guest management model was also built originally around minimizing travelers’ interactions with staff, including remote check-in by app, keyless building entry, forgoing the traditional lobby and reception desk, virtual concierge services, and on-demand housekeeping. When Sonder kept hitting up its investors for more money, the VCs saw the company’s tech-driven, “asset light” approach as a sweet spot to keep overhead low to boost profits. Now post-pandemic the company’s bet on ‘proptech’ instead of top-heavy staffing is proving to be wildly ahead of the game. Most importantly, Sonder built rent concessions into 60% of its leases in the event of a double dip recession, which currently means the startup is paying up to 20% less overhead for its real estate than its competitors as it navigates lower occupancy rates and the overall downward pressure on average nightly rates. For many other hotels teetering on bankruptcy, just half that 20% would change everything. “By design our business model already provided guests with more distance and privacy,” says Davidson of Sonder’s more self-sufficient hospitality approach. “We don’t have crowded lobbies, no front-desk, and no mid-stay cleanings. Our spaces are serviced digitally, and most offer full kitchens, living rooms and washer dryers. So in many ways, Sonder already met the needs of the new hospitality normal during the pandemic.” Sonder’s model also gave it the ability to pivot quickly to longer-term, more corporate housing like stays when coronavirus infections began to surge and states locked down, unlike traditional hotels whose relatively weighty operations, room configurations, and balance sheets are intrinsically front-loaded for nightly guests rather than tenants who stay for months. Full dining rooms is some Sonder apartments are ideal for cooking in and extended stays Courtesy of Sonder “Immediately following travel restrictions and shelter-in-place orders, we knew people would need a self-contained, safe, comfortable place to stay for a long period of time,” explains Davidson. “So we quickly launched our extended stay offering, providing significant discounts for stays over 14 days. We’ve seen a very positive response from college students, military personnel, displaced foreign diplomats, members of the press, and people forced to isolate themselves due to ill family members. We’re now back at 65% occupancy, with extended stay guests comprising 75% of those bookings.” For traditional hotels it’s more difficult to call a split-second audible like that. It’s not necessarily brand congruent in the first place, and it could be even harder to pivot back once the curve finally flattens or a vaccine is developed. So Sonder this month is doubling down again, positioning most of its inventory for long-term stays, anticipating that short-term hospitality needs 12-18 months to come back to pre-pandemic levels.   “We're changing a large portion of our portfolio to 6-12 month stays to provide more stability for our guests while travel rebounds,” says Davidson. “We’re also launching flex leases so guests booking on our website can pay monthly, instead of upfront, for stays longer than a month.” For its investors, Sonder’s quick pivot from digital hotel brand to more traditional property management is a sigh of relief that its business model is shock proof—at least so far—which can’t be said of many of Sonder’s competitors, or the millions of AirBnB hosts and small local hotels and bed and breakfasts that will never come back. Space to spread out and socially distance Courtesy of Sonder “The pandemic represents an unprecedented challenge to the world economy and the travel sector specifically,” says Davidson, “COVID has accelerated the process of reinvention. In so many ways—some long anticipated and some harder to predict. But it will change everything—travelers’ expectations and how they want to experience the world.” While Davidson doesn’t see “health detectors” in Sonder’s immediate future, the company is focused obsessively right now on building out its tech and operations further to encourage easier social distancing, even less interaction with staff, and more reassurance that rooms have been deeply cleaned. “The safety and wellbeing of our guests has always been a top priority and we’ll always be innovating here,” says Davidson. “This includes extra cleanings for high-touch surfaces like light switches and remote controls and removing and replacing all linen and consumables, regardless of whether they have been used or not. We’ve also added a screen to our housekeeping app requiring verification that high-touch surfaces have been disinfected.” Montage Kapalua bay overview. Don't stop traveling now Courtesy of Barbara Kraft/Montage Hotels How long all of these protocols can last without increasing costs while hotels also stay profitable is also anyone’s guess. Which is another one of hospitality’s most vexing dilemmas right now. With so many people wary of travel right now and lock downs that could extend into fall, it’s the worst possible time for a price hike. Every hotel needs every guest it can get. So what’s your next trip to the Four Seasons, Hilton, Hyatt, or Montage going to look like for the foreseeable future? Probably more like visiting someone at the hospital. But the food will be better. The beds will be more comfortable. And they’ll still serve cocktails by the pool in shrink wrap. But don’t worry. Hotels aren’t going anywhere soon. And even in their current “modified” format, it still beats staying locked down at home. Follow me on Twitter.  Peter Lane Taylor