Image of the week: Off-track hotels
“Was this the summer European tourism reached a breaking point?” asked the New York Times on the same day that more than 10,000 US hotel workers, at a breaking point of their own, began a three-day strike.
After contract talks with hotel operators Marriott International, Hilton Worldwide and Hyatt Hotels broke down, members of the Unite Here union in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, San Jose, Honolulu and Kauai in Hawaii, Greenwich in Connecticut, and briefly Baltimore marked the Labor Day holiday by walking out.
According to the union, hotel workers are being stretched too thin and are often required, since the pandemic, “to give five-star service with three-star staff”, and it is now seeking fair staffing and workloads, the reversal of Covid-era cuts and higher wages.
The hotel industry, Unite Here says, has gone “off track”, making record profits while guests don’t receive the services they deserve for their custom and – in a dismally familiar story – employees find their wages suppressed to the point that they can no longer afford to live in the cities in which they work.
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In numbers: Plunge time
$232 billion
Sum wiped off the value of Facebook’s parent company Meta one day in February 2022. This used to be the record for the single biggest one-day drop in stock market value by a US company. But not any more.
$279 billion
Loss of market capitalisation suffered by AI chipmaker Nvidia on Tuesday as it plummeted 9.5 per cent in New York, taking several other mega-caps into the red with it, amid investor concern that AI has been overhyped.
9
The morning after the collapse, Nvidia shares were still worth about nine times their price in November 2022, before the launch of ChatGPT sparked a surge in demand for its chips.
Getting to know: Jim Rowan
Since taking the helm at Swedish car maker Volvo Cars in 2022, Scotsman Jim Rowan has been busy reinvesting the company’s bumper earnings into creating “one new electric vehicle every year for the next five years”, as he told The Times last year. But now Rowan (59), a former chief executive of Dyson when it was toying with an EV of its own, has announced that its journey to selling only electric cars will be slower than expected. A plan to sell only EVs by 2030 – announced in 2021, before he joined the Chinese-owned company – has been adjusted to say it expects at least 90 per cent of its production to be either all-electric or plug-in hybrid, the rest being “mild hybrids” or petrol cars with energy-saving devices.
The future is still electric, says Rowan, whose LinkedIn bio suggests he is “on a mission to ensure we’re a leader and pioneer in protecting people and the planet”. Alas, the transition “will not be linear”, with customers and markets “moving at different speeds”. Anyone for more charging points?
The list: Tourist taxes
Tourist taxes predate 2024 – Bhutan has been doing it since 1974 – but they have become increasingly common this year, with several destinations either introducing new levies on visitors or hiking existing ones.
1. Venice: The city trialled a €5 “access fee” for day trippers this year, but it didn’t deter tourists, with the tax bringing in a lot more money than predicted.
2. Italy in general: Giorgia Meloni’s government is mulling a substantial increase in overnight tourist taxes, prompting a hospitality association to accuse it of treating hotels as ATMs.
3. Barcelona: As it tries to combat overtourism, the Spanish city will increase its tourist tax in October, marking the second such increase this year.
4. Dorset: The first coastal tourist tax in the UK was about to be introduced in parts of Dorset in July, but was postponed after opposition from hoteliers.
5. New Zealand: From October, the cost of entry fees to the country will triple to NZ$100, which is about €56, though it’s not stupid – Australians and travellers from most Pacific nations are exempt.
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