"July's Hottest Scoop: 5 Must-Know Facts to Stay Ahead of the Game!"

 Global IT Outage Shuts Down Airlines and Other Businesses; Hotels Still Dealing With 'Holiday Hangover'; UK Borrowing at Highest Debt Levels Since Early 1960s; No Tax on Tips Gets Support in US Congress; Alignment of Hotel Commercial Teams Still Proving to be Problematic.

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1. Global IT Outage Shuts Down Airlines and Other Businesses The global IT outage has shut down many services and businesses, especially airlines, which have been forced to make large-scale cancellations and delays, bringing global travel to a halt. 

The outage was related to a “flawed security update” from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike that forced Microsoft systems to restart and caused multiple system crashes.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has publicly apologized for the outage. 

and his company has implemented a fix, but IT experts say the manual nature of the fix could mean that while some systems can come back online immediately, others could take weeks to fix.

airlines and train services report delays and manually process tickets. In the US, American Airlines, Delta and United have grounded their fleets, and several companies – including some hotels – said they were having problems processing payments. 

Berlin Brandenburg Airport temporarily suspended all flights this morning. three American airlines issued a “global ground stop” on all their flights. Flights currently carried out by air will continue. 

but no further flights will take off at this time. Major airports around the world, including in Australia, India, Japan and Hong Kong, have reported major problems due to the power outages.

2. Hotels Still Dealing With 'Holiday Hangovers' The latest CoStar hotel performance data shows a year-over-year decline for the week ending July 13 across the U.S., continuing the post-Independence Day slump trend, according to STR's Isaac Collazo, Chris Klauda and William Anns.

Analysts say this reflects performance patterns observed before the COVID-19 pandemic and felt across all scales of the chain.

One reason for the difficulties in the hospitality industry is the growing interest in alternative accommodation and cruises, and this shift in travel market share is "exacerbated by strong international outbound travel."

3. UK Borrowing at Highest Debt Levels Since the Early 1960s The UK's Office for National Statistics has released new data showing debt levels in the country have reached their highest point since the early 1960s.

“Public sector net debt, excluding public sector banks, is tentatively expected to reach 99.5% of gross domestic product by the end of June 2024,” the office reported. “This is 2.8 percentage points higher than at the end of June 2023, and remains at levels last seen in the early 1960s.”

The new government elected in Britain's July 4 election, and the newly ruling Labor Party, will likely blame the previous Conservative Party government that ruled since 2010, but they will be under pressure to fix the problem.

Darren Jones, chief secretary to the UK Treasury, said, as reported by Morningstar, that “the figures are a stark reminder that this government inherited the worst economic conditions since the Second World War, but we are wasting no time fixing them. ”

4. No Tax on Tips to Get Support in the US Congress Ending the requirement to pay taxes on tips in the U.S., where millions of restaurant and hotel employees rely heavily on tips to make a living, was put forward as a call to action at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. 

the newspaper reported that the idea has the support of both senators Democratic Party in Nevada, including Las Vegas. According to the newspaper, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said the idea came to him while he was eating at a restaurant in a Las Vegas hotel and his waiter complained to him about the burden of the tip tax. The report adds, “About 4 million Americans work in jobs where tips are the norm.”

5. Hotel Commercial Team Alignment Still Proving to Be Problematic

Modern hospitality companies seek perfect alignment between hospitality departments and disciplines, but while talk of silos is a thing of the past, getting revenue, sales, marketing and all other components on the same page and working in the same direction is still evident.

challenging, according to speakers at the 2024 HSMAI Commercial Strategy Conference.

hoteliers say that bringing these three departments and others together requires effort and thought. 

Chris Hardy, vice president of commercial strategy at Parks Hospitality Group, said one of the challenges in aligning key performance metrics is that the systems each team uses still don't communicate well.

"I think the silos have been broken down, but the systems for each discipline have not," he said. "We're still working in an environment where revenue has systems, marketing has its own systems, and sales has more systems. There's still fragmentation there."

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