Luxury Hotels Want You to Stay Longer. NewsWire

NewsWire: 9/17/22

• Hotels are offering “resortainment” to get guests, especially families, to stay longer. With business travel still down, hotels are catering to leisure travelers who are often accompanied by kids and babies. (The Wall Street Journal)
  
• NH: Leisure travel has come roaring back from the depth of lockdowns. And with business travel still below pre-pandemic levels, hotels are hoping they can convince leisure travelers to stay longer with the help of “resortainment.”
• Meliá Hotels International (SMIZF), a global Spanish hotel chain, is adding a host of new attractions to its 380 properties. The chain has partnered with Falcon’s Beyond Global, a Florida entertainment company, to build theme parks, virtual reality gaming centers, minigolf, and theaters. Guests will have free access to all the amenities and, in turn, will hopefully book longer visits.
• Hotels are also trying to attract bigger groups--namely, families--with a wider range of child-oriented services. Before the pandemic, many resorts only offered daycare to kids over 4 or 5. But now hotels are offering to babysit for newborns. At Landings Resort and Spa, a luxury hotel in St. Lucia, guests are assigned a “butler” who will babyproof their rooms. At the Martinhal hotels in Portugal, guests are provided baby gates, bottle warmers, and changing mats on demand for free. 
• During the early days of the pandemic, we wrote about hotels offering private travel club subscriptions with exclusive services and perks to boost business. (See “Is the Future of Travel and Leisure Members-Only?”) Now many of these glitzy activities and luxury amenities come standard.

DID YOU KNOW?

• Now Streaming: Political Ads. You get campaign fliers and e-mails. Now get ready for the next wave of political ads: targeted commercials on streaming services. According to The New York Times, these ads are so precisely tailored that next-door neighbors watching the same show on the same service could see different ads based on their voting records, age, race, and countless other characteristics. Targeted streaming ads are expected to constitute $1.44B, or 15%, of the projected $9.70B on ad spending for the 2022 midterms. This would mark the first time political ad spending on streaming services has rivaled that on Facebook and Google. Some observers warn that the rapid growth of these ads is outstripping the law. Political ads that air on traditional TV, for instance, must disclose their sponsors, but this provision doesn't explicitly apply to streaming video. Most streaming services also lack the kind of ad content restrictions that Facebook and Google instituted to prevent manipulation after the 2016 election.