national Hotel Slump
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news
emand for hotel bookings has stabilised somewhat after falling off a cliff in April, the boss of Marriott said recently, as the group reported worse than expected first quarter results. Arne Sorenson said that occupancy at Marriott hotels was rising in China, the region hit earliest by the pandemic, and had stabilised elsewhere recently. Marriott is one of the world’s largest hotels groups, with 7,400 properties in 134 countries, and is a bellwether for the travel industry. To shore up its crumbling finances, the company raised $1.6 billion from a bond sale last month and $920 million by renegotiating branded credit card deals with JP Margan and American Express. The company has $12.2 billion debt and $1.8 billion cash at the end of March.
Success is not final; failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts. BUSINESS WISDOM
SME Debt Pile
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MEs will be left with as much as £105 billion of unsustainable debt within ten months due to the pandemic, according to a first estimate of the scale of the problem from a City group set up at the request of the Bank of England. The Recapitalisation Group, a panel of 45 bankers, fund managers, accountants and other business leaders under the auspices of the City UK, said there would need to be massive equity investment and forbearance on the debt to ease the strain on the companies.
No Stopping Gatwick
Sir Adrian Montague, chairman of the group, said the impact of the excessive debt would be serious, profound and far-reaching, in a letter to Andrew Bailey, governor of the BOE. He said: ‘Faced with falling revenues and additional debt, business will require full-scale recapitalisation to alleviate the hit to employment and to sustain the investment required to put the economy back on its feet’.
atwick Airport is going ahead with the plans to convert an emergency runway/taxiway to a functioning second runway, despite the collapse in air travel. It is anticipated to open in 2023 and will likely only handle short haul takeoffs. CEO Stewart Wingate said: ‘We’ve set ourselves a challenge of a public consultation in 2021 and then going into the planning process with a view to getting planning permission during the course of 2023’.
Sir Adrian, the chairman of insurance group, Aviva, said SME’s employed around 16 million people, which is about half the working population and turned over £2 trillion.
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