Pandox Hotel Market Day 2021

Ladies and gentlemen in the audience and everyone watching at home, welcome to Pandox Hotel Market Day 2021. Please welcome today's moderator, John Wiefström.

Good music, isn't it? Fine. Welcome to this fascinating afternoon. We're going to have afternoon local time, yes I know. We are doing the 26th edition of the Hotel Market Day at Pandox. Number 26, isn't that amazing? That, friends, entitles me to say that this is a sustainable event to trust, I think so. We're about 600 people to attend this, most of them online, and we have a great crowd present live as well. We have lots of top class speakers, but we're also going to activate you a little. I will come to that later on. So that info will come. It's been a tough year, it's been a year with lots of difficulties to tackle, lots of hard things to experience. I ask you to start this event by sharing with me and us a tribute to Anders Nissen of Pandox.

The first half of 2021 has been really challenging. We lost our cherished leader Anders Nissen to the COVID illness. Anders was a very inspiring person, I would say he was kind of a king of the hotel business. His attitude was always can do. If there was a counterwind, he would say let's force even more. Every day trying to find something that we can do better and try to improve yourself. Have fun, go to the job with a smile in the morning. That leadership is super important. As a person, Anders was very caring, he was fun, but he was very very determined. He was bold, very competitive, but yet very people centric. So everybody felt seen, everybody felt included. You always can improve yourself, and if you have that appetite, things normally go well.

Let me leave the floor to the chairman of the board of Pandox, Christian.

Dear friends, first of all thank you for being here, be it in person that's particularly nice of course or on the camera. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank you all for all the warmth and all the support we had during the difficult days where we lost Anders. Many of you wrote to us, many of you found us. It was very important and I'm very very thankful. This was difficult on the personal level. I would also like to thank the Pandox organization for stepping up when it was most needed. I still remember sitting in Norway, Anders was ill. I get the phone from Liia saying the worst has happened. I knew immediately what the worst was. And then you think Jesus Christ, this is really really horrible. You go completely into the basement. And then you start thinking, I lost one of my very best friends. But what is going to happen to the business? You have two thoughts in the head at the same time. And it did not take long. The messages come in from the leaders of Pandox and they say: Mr. Chairman, don't worry, we know exactly what to do. You need not be afraid sitting in Norway. We will continue in the Anders Pandox spirit. No worry. That was fantastic. And that is exactly what has happened the last year. I was the star of a film that some of you saw where I was having a chess match with the COVID virus. Of course being the chairman of Pandox, I won the match, and I won it in the year 2022... the year we are in now, and my weapon was of course the vaccine. And we are winning the COVID fight. But of course it's not a straight line. Every war that's being fought, you win some battles, you lose some battles. Right now it's winter, the virus is getting a little bit stronger. Some people don't understand that it's actually quite smart to be vaccinated. You know, it's like if you're out in the forest with a lot of wolves, it's very smart to have something that keeps the wolves away. And COVID is a real wolf's illness. But we have some temporary close downs and restrictions in Europe. We still are not certain when the travel from the Far East is coming back. So you know, you could be worried. But look at what has happened the months we have behind us now: September, October, November. All the regional cities better than 2019 in northern Europe. The capitals we are at 85 to 90%. So it just shows you that once restrictions disappear, the business is back, the underlying growth is there. How long will it take before we're finished with COVID? I gave you an indication last year that the fight was starting and we're winning. But now, now the year 2022 will be the year where COVID for all practical purposes will disappear. When I stand here one year from now, I will be in bright circumstances. To quote or paraphrase rather Winston Churchill, you remember his words, but I will just say them slightly differently: This is not the end of the beginning, but it is the beginning of the end. So that is good, because people live to live, not to avoid dying. So it will be good for us in 2022. And I will stand here on this very day and I will say: I have then seen revenues increase, I have seen the valuation of those revenues increase. Double confetti, I will be happy, I will feel rich. The Pandox share price will be well above now. My friend Georgia will have bought hotels for us. I will take out my sunglasses and say: Now, fall 2022, the future is so bright I need to wear glasses. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Christian. I've got one single question to you because we're looking forward just as you did now. And how can you manage to transfer and develop the Anders spirit into something new to lift this company to new heights?

I think Anders spirit was so strong in Pandox, and I don't know if it was only Anders or if it was interaction with Anders that made this fantastic Pandox spirit. And as I just told you, the Pandox spirit lives on and it started to live on and get stronger from the day that Anders disappeared. It's a strange and it must be the ultimate testimony to his genius that it actually continued and is becoming even stronger. I always called Anders Mr. President, he called me Mr. Chairman, but he was Mr. President. Now we have Liia as the new leader. And you know what I call her? I call her Mutti. And there's listen, I call her Mutti because the mothers are the wise ones, they keep the family in this case the extended family of Pandox together, and they know how to embody the spirit of Pandox, but they will do it in a different way than Anders did. So I look very much with brightness on the future. So then I can say thank you, Mr. Chairman. You can thank you, Mr. Journalist.

Thanks a lot. Some of you out there and here already wonder who is this. This is Gun Lundemo. She's a professional DJ. She's touring all over the world, aren't you? Like where?

Three, four continents. Not so much Asia. I did Israel, but not like Asia Asia, but yeah everywhere, yeah yeah.

And today you're not only a DJ, you are sidekicking me as a moderator. You are used to produce stuff not only music but events as well. Yes, you are for example the producer of Stockholm Pride Festival. Yeah, it's the biggest pride festival in Scandinavia. It's wonderful. That's not bad, no. We do enjoy that you're here, thank you, and we will hear a lot from Gun later on. Please give her a hand.

Uh, we're still looking back a little, then we attack the future. So let's take a check on a little bit of moving images: a year in review.

If year 2020 was the year of the ultimate stress test for Pandox and hotel industry, then 2021 is so far a year of repair and some very promising signs of market recovery. 2021 has been characterized by a lot of travel and social distancing restrictions, so obviously for a hotel owner it's been very poor numbers. The main learning point from the pandemic is that our business model works and that we have a great team at Pandox. Without the people at Pandox we would have been in big trouble. As of second half of 2021, we see hotels filling up again. When people are allowed to travel and to live in hotels, they will travel and live in hotels. Hopefully 2022 we'll see a continued market recovery with more segments coming back, especially business and international travel.

Time to introduce the real host for this event, the CEO of Pandox. Please welcome the CEO of Pandox, Liia Nõu.

Thank you, Liia Nõu. I promised some activity. This is a message for you online only. You have access to the QR code to today's three questions which are supposed to answer during the afternoon. So please check the QR code that you have perhaps already seen or will see on the screen, and don't be unhappy, it will come up during the break after this first part of the afternoon. So please answer the questions. We will give you the answers of the poll later on. Okay. So it's time to introduce our keynote speaker. He recently released a book, he's written many, but the last one is called Rescue, and that is what it's all about. He will talk about a theme that I guess everybody loves. He will talk about how to create a better world. Please welcome the Professor of Globalization and Development at the University of Oxford, Ian Goldin.

Thank you very much. It's really wonderful to be here but I do want to begin with a tribute to Anders. It was Anders that called me up and invited me to be here. An absolutely inspirational person, and I've worked with many inspirational people around the world, but I know that you all miss him as I do, and it's just wonderful to hear from the chairman, from the new CEO, how what he wanted to happen was to take Pandox to a greater height, to work for a better world, is being implemented even after his terribly tragic and untimely death. Can we create a better world out of this terrible pandemic? Is it possible that out of all this suffering we can see more rapid progress? And I believe it is. I believe this is the wake-up call that will take us from sleepwalking into disasters to create a more sustainable, a better world, not only for ourselves and everyone we care about but for generations to come everywhere. People talk about bouncing back or bouncing forward. I don't like those words because it implies we are heading on the same tracks that we were before, back on the same road. I think we need to do things differently because that is the road that was leading us over the precipice, that is the road that brought us this pandemic, the failure to manage these systemic risks which were inevitable, rising climate change and other system unsustainable tensions. Even the word reset disturbs me because when we reset our computers we go back to the operating system which was already there. No, we need to do things differently now. We need to take from this and the suffering a resolution to do things in a way that will not allow us to get back to this place again, that this will never happen again. Is this possible? I compare the First and Second World War, when you're all familiar with your histories. During the midst of the Second World War, and it was interesting to hear the chairman citing Churchill, during the midst of that war while the bombs were literally dropping on the buildings of Whitehall where he was working, when they were fighting on five fronts, when there was an existential crisis, a real threat as you can see if you go around England where Dad's Army was building block houses, a real threat of a German invasion. At that time, Roosevelt, Churchill, the leaders resolved to never let this happen again, to create a better world, to create the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the Marshall Plan, the welfare state, the seeds of Europe that we see today having flowered so beautifully. It wasn't after, it wasn't years later, it was in that experience because they and particularly the individuals like Roosevelt and Churchill had experienced the First World War, had seen that tensions that arose after it led to growing nationalism and protectionism in Germany, the reparations, the inequality, the unemployment, the consumption-fueled boom of a hundred years ago, the roaring twenties, the Gatsbys had built resentment. They saw that and they decided: never again. It's interesting too that Churchill six weeks after the war lost power. He was taken out of government by a complete unknown, Clement Attlee, because he wouldn't walk the talk that he'd been advocating. It wasn't part of the Conservative Party manifesto. Came back a few years later when they put it in. People were hungry for change. The citizens wanted different things. And the same thing happened in the U.S., the same thing happened across Europe. We saw tax rates of seventy percent in the US, followed by Europe. We saw redistribution, we saw health services, education services, and a new world. Now we're at a different time. We're at a time where there has been the rise of individualism in societies, there's been the rise of business, a much healthier balance between business and government, and the rise of course of civil society. It's not only businesses that set the agenda or governments. An individual standing outside their school, like Greta Thunberg, or sending a tweet, creating the MeToo movement, can create global change. People are empowered in new ways. And we have an understanding which is much more profound about the world. We understand what's going on with climate change, and unless we move to net zero urgently over the next 30 years, the outcome will be catastrophic. We know why this pandemic came. Yes, we can debate whether it was from a lab or from a wet market in Wuhan, but we know it's inevitable. I predicted the pandemic as the big next catastrophe because our interdependent systems, more people with more animals near more airports, means the probability rises exponentially. Our hyper-connected systems which bring all the goods of globalization, including our wonderful digital connectivity that allows us to have this online meeting as well as physical, also can spread cyber viruses. Our financial systems can spread financial crises. Our airports spread pandemics. So the great challenge of our world as more and more people develop wealth and connectivity is how do we live together more effectively. And part of that is seeing this pandemic as the defining moment, as seeing it as an ability to understand that governments can do things that were simply unimaginable in January 2020. If government had told me in January 2020 I couldn't fly or I couldn't go to a restaurant, I couldn't leave my home, I couldn't do certain things, I would have thought I lived in an authoritarian state. Now I recognize it's in my own self-interest when these lockdowns happen. My behavior has changed in radical ways since January 2020, doing things I would never have dreamt of doing before. And we of course understand too that science has just been miraculous, creating a vaccine or series of vaccines in nine months that would have taken 10 years to do before, through global collaboration. We recognize that change is possible in ways that were just unimaginable in January 2020. Things have happened, the evidence is there. If governments had created twenty trillion dollars of stimulus in January 2020, we would have thought they were extreme communist left-wingers, and even they wouldn't have dreamt of it. Now we're wondering whether it's enough. This change happens very quickly when circumstances change, and they are changing. But it's important that we take from that things that we value. We've all had an opportunity, loss of people we love, importance of friendships, not going to the places we do, not having the opportunities to reevaluate, revaluate, and recalibrate what we do and how we do it. What's important? And out of this I believe will come a great regeneration, a healthier world. We saw in COP in Glasgow a couple of weeks ago this acceleration of commitments to zero carbon, of course not enough in not enough places, but massive progress, not least by the business sector which was out in front of many governments. We see every day in people's choices this great reshuffling of jobs that's going on, what in the US is called the Great Resignation, people changing jobs to take on jobs they prefer. And of course we see it in other great changes. What the pandemic has done is accelerate time. It's compressed in the period of 18 months events that would have taken 10, 20 years to unfold. Whether it's the shift of economic gravity to the East, whether it's the transformation of our economies to more digital, whether it's us entering remote work, old equilibriums have been broken and new equilibriums are not established. I'm incredibly optimistic about cities and work and about the prospects for a group like Pandox. That's because quality matters, that's because experience matters, the tangible. Whether it's being with people, eating a meal, going to the theater, this is what we will value more and more. And as technology increasingly does more and more jobs that people used to do, automation, robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, people will specialize in what we are uniquely able to do, which is be creative, be empathetic, care for people, create in ways that machines won't be doing, I think in my lifetime. And that is going to create a sweet spot for people to come together in more structured ways, in quality environments, in cities, in rural areas, to experience things, whether it's beautiful places, experiences with people, theater, movies, whatever. And we'll value these things more and we'll pay a greater share of our incomes for them. And so when you think forward about what this means for cities, there's a huge but different, I think in the way it's organized, not least for offices and how offices and commuters relate. Change is coming, it's that which we need to embrace. When we think about the pandemic, I believe we'll be seeing this as a great turning point. A turning point where we had an opportunity to go back to our old old ways, or turning point where we decided to walk a different road, to walk a road which embraces the urgency of what creating a sustainable inclusive world means. This incredible country of Sweden is way ahead of the country that I'm in in many respects on this. But it's by learning from each other, by sharing this experience and coming together on a day like this that I believe one can really leapfrog into this. So I really appreciate this opportunity. The vision that Anders had of Pandox Hotel Market Day, but coming together of people, and I hope it really does contribute to the creation of a better Pandox and a better world. Thank you.

Ian, please join me for some Q&A here, some follow-up questions. I've studied a lot about what you've said before and what you've written. And the basic message from you is optimism. When I listen to you, I get a bit pessimistic, honestly. And that is that the change you are looking for requires leadership in the world. Well, we have none. Or what do you think?

Well, I can understand why if you look at some of these politicians and governments you might feel a bit pessimistic. But what I think we need to appreciate is that the day where governments determine our future, that we kick upstairs all the problems to political leaders who will resolve them, is a day that's passed. The people in this room, individuals, schoolgirls, others set the agenda for change, and governments follow. So my view is that the big challenge is the fake news, the contesting of ideas. When good people stay silent, when they stay on the sidelines, when they don't contest ideas, extremists and bad ideas flourish. And that's why we need to engage. But yes, there's an absence of what you might think of as global political leaders, but there's no absence of leaders in every other sphere. So we actually push our governments absolutely in front of us. We can't use the change you're talking about, we can't use government failure or the failure of the UN, the gridlock in the system as an excuse. If you do that, then there's a good reason to be pessimistic.

In your last book, Rescue, you write a lot about the problem with inequality. And you can surely say that inequality has grown during the pandemic, right? I discussed this a little with Gun. I think she's got a question around that, the divide that has been deepened really. What about that, Gun?

I mean us in the younger generations, we are kind of the losers in the pandemic. What do you think needs to happen for us to become the winners in the future?

Yeah, I think it's right. I have a chapter on inequality and I have a chapter on young and old in Rescue. And both show very clearly that the pandemic has exacerbated the inequalities within countries, because some people have been able to carry on work, people that have tech stocks have done incredibly well, there have been some sectors that have thrived and others, not least in hospitality and people working in hospitality which is often not only young people but also women, have done much worse. So we see this widening gulf, and it's also of course true in the mortality statistics. In the UK, Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people are four times as likely to have died from COVID-19 as people white middle-aged people like me. So it's reflected across the board. And of course it's even greater between countries. So the World Bank estimates that 150 million more people are being pushed into absolute poverty by the pandemic, about the same number of people suffering from extreme malnutrition, and the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, completely derailed by the pandemic. So that is certainly true. And the young and old thing is equally true, not only in multiple ways: both jobs that young people have had a high incidence of job losses, but also huge loss of education, from social experience, and massive problem of loneliness and isolation, as well, which the data shows very clearly, not least in Stockholm. I was surprised to see the evidence from Stockholm on how many people live alone, young people live alone in Stockholm. So what to do about it? I think first recognize the issue. Within countries, I do believe that we need to reinforce education, health, wealth, estate, public transport. I think that's inevitable. I think there needs to be deliberate catch-up programs for people that have lost education. And I think it's part of this big debate which I know Pandox is involved in: when do you reopen hotels, when do you open hospitality, how do you get people back into work, and do you pay them a living wage? The global inequality needs to be addressed by massive transfers, I think, of aid, and also the writing down of a lot of debt. In sharp contrast to the 2008-9 crisis where there was solidarity, this time around aid has actually been cut. You know, the UK cut its aid by a third during the pandemic, but not only the UK, many countries have cut aid. And that is just a remarkable failure, I think, on the global scene. It's like international solidarity has disappeared during the pandemic. We see it also in vaccines, of course, less than eight percent of Africans double vaccinated. So this failure, this national retreat, is something which is of great concern. Again, I think it's not going to be solved by politicians, it needs to be solved by all of us shouting loudly about it.

Ian, you underlined that you dislike the expression 'business as usual', that has been part of the problem. Now isn't that exactly what is going on now? We're going back to business as usual.

I don't think so. I mean, some businesses are, but I think they are not going to be the businesses of the future. What we saw in Glasgow was a massive commitment to zero carbon, which is going to become increasingly serious. So that's one very positive sign. I think we're seeing businesses across the board taking a lead, often on the environment, work environment, and safety of their people and their guests, in their work environment, often ahead of governments in this respect, which is a very positive sign. I think we're seeing the glaring light of transparency thrown on companies. The scandals that have emerged on accounting and on other areas, I think, are creating a new transparency. And shareholders are increasingly demanding to know what their leaders are doing. In private equity, I think it's easier to do things that you can't do in listed markets, but there too, I mean, I'm part of various investment committees, and I'm amazed how much time we spend on these investment committees on ESG. You know, what would have been an afterthought five years ago is now the main item after returns on the agenda. This is different. In the book, I cite statistics on demands for ESG reporting have increased five-fold in the last three years, you know. So these firms that are doing the work behind this are in a very good business. So I think there's lots of very positive signs on this, which give one hope. The big issue that's coming, and it's sort of going to be a long tail out of Glasgow, is if some countries don't transform, like let's say China and India stay on coal, and we decide that we want to go to zero carbon, are we going to change our supply chains? And I think in Europe at least, we're going to see very high carbon taxes, and we're going to see carbon border adjustments, and I think we'll see a redirection of globalization based on ESG considerations.

Now, Ian, you may think that this is a question beside the point, but it's not, because personal background is always interesting. You've been Vice President of the World Bank some years ago. You've also belong to the few who have worked closely with Nelson Mandela. I think you should share with us a little about that.

Yeah, thank you John. He was the most amazing person I've ever worked with, and I've worked with many many leaders. And I, you know, there's a number of things. Firstly, he was an optimist. He always said it's always impossible until it's done. And you know, he spent 27 years in prison, he never lost hope, and he transformed the country. He was one of the most humble people I've ever met. I mean, lots of little incidents I could tell you. Like when you know when we're in Buckingham Palace or something, he wants to go into the kitchen to say thank you to the chef. He's not because he wants to do a PR stunt, but because he really wanted, he felt it. Always saying thank you to the drivers, the cleaners, everyone. Interested in everything. He was an incredible listener. He had to deal with some very difficult decisions, like for example when we got into government, whether to nationalize the mines or the banks, which is what the left wing of the party was saying, or not to. He didn't understand economics, he worked through it because he was an incredible lawyer by just listening to the arguments and questioning them, making sure everyone had their say, and then making up his mind and sticking to it. He also, which is not something I think you can naturally learn, he had a photographic memory, which was incredible because he'd remember every argument he'd ever heard about anything, and be able to retain it and pull it out, which was terrifying for me because he asked me why something was important, or you know, I sort of worked on some economic theory with him, why savings were important, why not, imagine, and then he'd say 'But last time two years ago you said this.' Which is a tough boss to have, but absolutely extraordinary. He knew everyone's first names. My kids, for example, we went out back to South Africa when my kids were very small, and my wife, and you know, you'd never ever start a meeting without saying how they're doing, how was their school, are they settling in. Personal, not never because of a show, but because he genuinely cared about it. The most remarkable man. I could go on for a long time, but yeah, if we picked up a little bit from him, we'd all be better for it. Thanks a lot, Ian.

We will very soon talk about cities here. After that, I will call on you again. So you just get the little thank you now, and you get the big thank you later.

The theme is cities. We all like to discuss cities, don't we? And the future of them, the big cities, how will they develop, and so on. So our next speaker will talk about that online from London. I hope we have the connection now. Please welcome partner and disruption lead at PwC United Kingdom, Leo Johnson.

Hi everybody. I just want to check I can see you. Can you see me? Yes we can see you and we hope you hear us. Everything's okay. Great to hear you, and I so wish I was with you. With you, Yan, with you Ian, so great to hear you again, and with the Pandox family. And I have such wonderful memory of my last trip, great event, and you know, I commemorate Anders with you all. It's good to have you here this way as well, Leo. I'll give you around 10 minutes, a little more to speak uninterruptedly, and then we talk okay. It's a deal. Great, look, I love to hear those stories about Nelson Mandela. Can I throw out another possible hero for me? Of a completely different one. She just like planted this one idea in my head around optimism, which is this. She's not really a political philosopher, she's not a politician, but it's Marilyn Monroe. And Marilyn Monroe once gave this great quote, which for me is the sort of landmark quote about the future. And it's this: 'Sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall into place.' And for me, what we're at is the ultimate Marilyn Monroe moment. You know, I think we've had the city of Henry Ford, the most of us grew up in the city of fossil...

Fuel river mass production the city shaped by the car we were cut off by the hard boundaries of the street where we got into these moving boxes of our cars or the tube or the bus and got into another stationary box of the office and we kind of accommodated ourselves to the machines of mass production and we live these lives anchored around efficiency and that's what kind of generated the returns. And I think there is an existential threat to that old city to that city of Henry Ford and I think we are now at this point where as Marilyn said it's starting to fall apart and it's falling apart under the pressures that Ian just went through with us it's this collection of mega trends that are colliding and it's climate change and it's environmental scarcity and we're seeing this interdependency between them where you know as the climate threatens fragile states you have the pressures for migration the pressures of migration then increasing the risk of populism the populism then exacerbating protectionist trends that reduce economic growth that same reduction in economic growth and block supply chains driven by supply chain of course starts to push up prices and give us the risk of inflation which makes the economic conditions for the many worse amplifying the threats of protectionism and then the risk finally that what we start to see is a civil society that feels that government is just failing to deliver on the needs of the many that the combination of aging populations adult social care costs ballooning deficits and here in the UK just with the very small increases in inflation that we've had in interest rates the government had to pay 84 billion more pounds last year in interest payments than it did the year before and at this moment of peak personal household and national debt some of these margins are extremely tight and you've got a system that could start to be failing to deliver on the needs of the many very very rapidly. So we got this precarious model this instability of inequality that Ian just talked us through.

And if I think about where we're headed I think you've got the potential that we can go two ways because the elephant in the room of course is technology what's technology and the new generation of exponential technologies that we got going to start to do to the ability to deal with these threats. And I was in Singapore the other day I sometimes do this radio program for BBC Radio 4 called Future Proofing and it's about what's coming down the track and by the way generally on at the same time as this other TV show called Bake Off so actually no one listens to this program but it gives me an insight into what's coming down the track and I was in Singapore and I got into their smart car their driverless car which was great for about 250 meters then it immediately went onto the wrong side of the road in front of a dumpster truck the guy pulled us back to safety and said okay that didn't go that well but you've got to understand this driverless car is not your usual driverless car it's a do-it-yourself one which any of us could make off the shelf supermarket technology you could retrofit it onto your own Volvo onto your own Skoda whatever you've got and it basically worked for the rest of the day but we went back to the ministry of transport and he basically talked me through the city of the future and this is the Singapore plan for what a city should look like step one is driverless cars which will then be followed by vertical takeoff and landing craft step two is to fully automate the economy step three is to put all citizens on universal basic incomes step four with northern Jakarta going underwater down the road from climate change is to use blockchain based facial recognition technologies to close off the city gates to migration because they said it will be too socially complex so what you've got is Singapore which has been this engine of Southeast Asian inclusive economic growth the city is the umbilical cord that pumps nutrients through into the broader economy and the outlying regions it suddenly becomes this closed community it becomes like Santan in South Africa for example here it becomes this barrio this gated community and you see a straight line from the technological into the social into the political. That's one city of the future and in the hotel space of course it's the VR substitutes it's the AI hotels you name it. But I think the really interesting thing is to look at a different deployment of technology.

There's this great quote from Kentaro Toyama who says technology is not the answer it's the amplifier of intent. And when Ian talks about the turning point this I think is exactly what we need to turn what we need to turn is the intent with which we are deploying technology that is the pivot that needs to be made. And if we go back I just did a program on this which really opened my eyes to the fundamentals go back to 2008 go back to when the wheels really started to come off what was going on there that was a model of capitalism that had a vision which was its intent was to take a look at the urban and suburban affluent billion the people inside the cities by and large and to figure out a way to deliver mass-produced goods into that market and then as those markets got saturated to find new ways deliver new goods goods with built-in obsolescence you name it and then as they again found those markets saturate to find new financial products including cheap debt including ninja loans to people with no income no jobs no assets to increase the penetration into these communities with products based on a consumer capitalist model that ultimately in the form of the subprime crisis was a model of growth that was a bit like fishing with dynamite in Lake Victoria where in the short term you get a lot of growth but actually you end up killing off the entire ecosystem and the future for potential for demand that was capitalism serving inside the wall. And I think this wall analogy is really important because 30 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell that was the triumph of capitalism in theory but actually what we've discovered is it was not the end state that this was actually the ticket to stay at the table and see if as a model of growth and as a model of political economy it could deal with the problems we've got and in those last 30 years even though the Berlin Wall came down another wall has stayed up another much bigger wall an invisible wall of wealth of assets that capitalism has not torn down at all and as Ian just said actually with pandemic driven increases in inequality that wall has got higher and as climate change threatens to destabilize political economies the example of Singapore shows that actually that wall's not going to be just invisible in the future we've got this window now where the direction we're headed towards is the walls becoming physical as well and the question is what are we going to do about that and what's the city of the future going to look like and this is where I think it's just interesting to look at this alternative vision this alternative intention of what we do with technology which is actually to turn it outwards instead.

A lot of the stuff that's most exciting for me at the moment we're doing a lot of work with climate tech startups around net zero but it's of course much bigger than that is just the wealth of opportunities that we're seeing to use tech and of course it's not the panacea it's just one plank on the raft that's got to get us across the chasm but to use tech to start to solve these problems and what do they look like I've been talking to a company called Game Forest and they're looking at Amazon deforestation you know one of the great triumphs of COP but how do you enforce it how do you make it happen when it's now become the biggest net emitter in Brazil for example so they're working with a tribe in Brazil called the Kayapo and the Kayapo are an indigenous community that live in an area that's twice the size of the UK it's about 10 million hectares of virgin forest and it's got the equivalent of about 2.5 billion tons worth of carbon in the trees and the Kayapo with their blowpipes with their indigenous tools they don't just know the endpoints to the forest but they control the choke points that the loggers come in and out of with their trucks and what Game Forest does is it uses satellites high resolution imagery of the trees to verify that the trees actually are there that they have not gone down and then on that basis to be using a blockchain enabled coin that provides rewards payments for ecosystem services to the Kayapo to give them the resources to continue to preserve and you can see on the map you know one patch is green the other is orange and yellow you can see the difference in the deforestation. You take another example on the side which is not just green but social as well because this has absolutely got to be both. Take the hardest problem the hardest nut you could possibly crack the 1.2 billion people in the world who don't even have electricity they don't have power because they don't have power and they spend 70% of their income on kerosene firewood you name it so just take a simple stack of technologies like the d.light solar light which might cost $200 so you can't afford it if you don't have power or income but then you've got a SIM card in it then with the chip it can be turned on and off remotely this is a company called Am=Coper based out of Oxford who Ian will know as well and then it's 50 to 60 cents a day you can lease it for way cheaper than the cost of kerosene or firewood and you get access to a banking system and micro insurance and the ability to get a loan for the $36 KickStart hand pump which gets you access to the underground water table and you can then triple the number of crops that you're providing and in one study income went up from $180 to $800 exam pass rates up from 58% to 83% and the point is it's a market that as you serve it it grows it's the opposite of the subprime you're increasing their productive capability you're increasing their potential to make their lives better and then of course go up the value chain and get loans for agricultural equipment maybe 3D printed Shanzai agricultural equipment and loans for refrigeration basically to become viable successful self-sustaining local small business farmers. Why do I say that I think we are at this point of transition this inflection point Leo don't forget our deal I'm finishing now actually.

We're at this time we're at this tournament the delta between the good and the bad is as big for our generation as it's ever been and that's the turning point and for me there's only one fork to take and anything which gets people together anything like events anything like hotels where people come together communicate share ideas and breed off each other the capacity to innovate that's a pretty crucial part of the mix and yeah I've gone over myself fine Leo.

So I think you've got to look at your city and you've got to ask yourself and this is Lorenzo Piano's distinction the architect the great architect says is your city shaped like the plaza the shopping mall or is it shaped like the piazza the place where people get together and where the real entertainment is each other that's what the city of the future has its real asset it's the brains it's the people it's the cognitive surplus and I think the city of the future is not just that place where they mix and match together it's the place where there's then of course an ecosystem of innovators where there's a VC network that can get those innovators through the valley of death but it's in the end it's the city where the people are unlocked and are able to be with each other and just get that extraordinary mash-up between problem and solution.

I mean I kind of feel like I got the answer but I'm wondering is it going to be easy to live in that city in the future like this smart future city that you're talking about.

I think so I think I mean in the end people vote with their feet and to get those best people you got to make it livable and not just livable you've got to make it fun you've got to make it a people a place where people want to get out want to be with each other where the sheer friction of the other a city is the place where you're most likely to meet the other you've got to make that the beautiful thing we've had a century of the self we're about to have a possible century where what we do is turn our back on the other and lock them out the city that will thrive will be the one that does exactly the opposite and creates these multiple open spaces for us just to collaborate and do stuff together.

I wish we could be together because we always have fun together especially over a drink but later I mean I think Leo is right that the vibrant cities will be places where there's sparks where people can do things they can't do on their own they can't do elsewhere so they're tolerant places they diverse places they're creative places but another vision of cities of the future is that they're refuges you know when I think of the fact that 99% of city growth is in middle income and low-income countries virtually all population growth in the future is in these cities and these cities whether it's Lagos or Mumbai or others like them are basically places where people have left fragile and increasingly fragile because of countryside and rising oceans and floods and droughts left where they've been and are coming to cities to try and survive and they're increasingly informal because the cities can't cope and can't supply enough people with enough resources people are finding solutions for themselves in these places and that's quite extraordinary and when you add to that you know maybe a meter or more ocean rise this century increasing floods big extreme weather events including hurricanes and others these are fragile places so all the action political action economic action something like 80% of economic activity in the world in cities already you know 60% of population 80% of economic activity what does that tell you that cities are much more productive places than other places and that shows in all the productivity statistics so they can I think they're going to be increasingly varied big challenges and that's where all the action is.

Yeah it's an index looks at growth not just economic growth but livability and there's equally a livability index there's also a net zero economy index so these multiple indices but I think there is a really important point to make and it builds on Ian's point too that the city is interrelational inside the city for sure that's what makes the successful city but I think it's also got to be interrelational outside the city yes I think a city is as healthy as the economic region around it is healthy and where I think things will really break down is if actually what we decide to do is ignore the broken countryside and allow the continued trend of distress migration from the countryside into the city the 1.5 million a week that are fleeing into the cities they will have two side effects they will swamp the city that doesn't have the infrastructure to deal with them in the first place and that is facing these threats of sudden or gradual climate change that is going to break the existing infrastructure they've got that's the first problem the city can't handle it the second problem is the countryside then becomes broken as well so what we need to do urgently is focus not just on cities but their interrelationship between the rural and the urban we need to make the countryside work and we need the city as a vibrant market for the countryside and source of talent and two-way traffic I don't know if Ian you would agree with that.

We do talk on some stuff it would be fair to say I did not write his speech yesterday okay no he should have been a lot better he's my brother and I love him as we all love all of our family members and we do talk on some stuff and I'll also say that over the last couple of years there's been such a lot of passion around doing some of the green industrial development stuff and I've really thought okay damn some of this is good stuff I mean much as I would love to throw darts some of the environmental agenda I've really thought okay and I've really tried to lean in with ideas on that as well.

So usually when I do different productions DJ productions you come up here you play it's the same thing every time and I usually tell the people that I can make something fun something special I can produce you a special jingle but they usually say no because they don't understand what I mean but Pandox liked it they said yes so here is an example. Yeah you get it I mean you feel it right okay now I tell you what this is not just anybody singing yes it's not just anybody I produce the track and I call my best friend Jasmine Cara she's a famous Swedish singer who is singing on the tracks today she played for Beyonce she stayed in New York the past I think 15 years she's been in a couple of competitions like Melodifestivalen and TV shows Let's Dance these kind of things she's really amazing.

Good afternoon and it's fantastic to be back in Stockholm after last year obviously not being able to come for a variety of reasons it's good to be back in person. And what I've been asked to talk to you a little bit about over the next 10 minutes or so is kind of what happens next for the industry. And I think you know part of the challenge of answering that without using a crystal ball is that things are changing all the time right so what we decided to do very early on in the pandemic is to see what insight what data what sentiment we could find to help guide us. So what I'm going to show you is not going to necessarily be the truth in the future but it's how people guests businesses are feeling right now. So you know some of the questions we're being asked right now are when is this going to be over is corporate travel ever going to come back is guest behavior going to fundamentally change and then we heard previously some changes around the tech side and of course ESG hugely important as well I won't quite have enough time to cover all of those but what I did want to start out with is just give you a bit of sentiment of where the industry sees disruption and how long that's going to go on for. And so we do a survey every quarter or so and that suggests that disruption is expected to continue throughout next year and into 2023 and if you look at what's happening in certain countries right now again that could move out slightly to the right. And in terms of normalization of trade business as usual which of course we're never going to go back to business as usual how it was but the sentiment there is we're looking at 2023 but a not insignificant minority think that's going to carry on into 2024 and I've just seen the latest results of the next version of this survey which will release next week and the positive news there is that has stabilized so people aren't thinking this is going to continue beyond this at the moment. So one of the other questions I get asked a lot is around corporate travel I think we feel a bit more confident around leisure travel we had strong summers strong domestic demand in leisure destinations but what about corporate travel. And we've just in August interviewed 140 execs who have control over significant corporate travel budgets and we asked them one of the questions we asked them is when do you think you'll be spending as much as you did in 2019. And what you can see on that graph is it's going to be steady improvement but it's going to take time so the dark blue line that you see is when they think they're going to be spending 100% of what they spent in 2019. And I think the number I can't quite read it from here but I think it's 52 or 54 I think they'll be back to 100% of spend by the end of next year so still a long way to go. And then if you start asking individuals how likely they are to travel for business in the next three months and whether technology has fundamentally changed how they will travel or if they'll travel less frequently you get some really interesting geographic differences. So the Chinese say 37% of the Chinese say they'll travel for business in the next three months and only 5% think technology has fundamentally changed how they will travel for business. In the US that drops to 27% and 14%. If you bring it into Europe in the UK again another significant drop only 17% think they're going to travel for business over the next three months and the Germans over a quarter of Germans think that technology has fundamentally changed how they will travel for business in the future. Now as an advisor one bit of comfort I take from this is the consistency as one number moves down the other one moves up but of course in any good data set you need an outlier so I thank India for providing that 69% think they're going to travel for business over the next three months but also loads of them over a third think that technology has fundamentally changed how they will travel for business. So I haven't quite figured out the answer to why that is and I'll let you know when I do. So why are people traveling for business and interestingly both in Sweden I'll show you data for China and the UK as well the biggest reason to travel is for conferences exhibitions and trade shows so something that typically lags behind but it clearly shows this pent-up demand to get back together like we are today and network. Whereas the Chinese for example you know not likely to travel to make a sales call which you can see highlighted there but if I take that back to Sweden in Sweden that is one of the main reasons for traveling for business. And then in all three markets that I've shown you so China Sweden and the UK training is very very low down the list and of course that is because technology is playing a major role of delivering training in different ways. So again very different reasons for travel and by geography there as well. And so when you look at this and this is again a piece of research that we've done splitting into quadrants what areas are going to thrive in terms of demand and what which ones are most at risk to be replaced by technology. So what I'm doing right now which is delivering content at a conference is at risk of being replaced by technology but what you just did when you all walked out and networked with each other it's going to be absolutely thriving because people have that requirement to meet in person. So I think it's really critical to look at what aspects are going to be influenced by that change in behavior of business travel that I highlighted a little earlier on as well. So our consumer behavior is going to change. And what you see up on screen there is a tool called Location Edge a geospatial analytics tool that we use and it looks at all Visa spend a lot of telephonic has mobile phone tracing data to look at immediate behavior changes as people spend on food and beverage or shop in grocery stores and so on. And what you see up on the screen there is the data for Paddington Station in London right pre-pandemic. And what you see is a lot of people obviously commute into London so the spend comes from the left there into Paddington and that's where it gets spent. So what does that look like due to COVID? Well interestingly the market size has only dropped from about 345 million to 320 million because what's happened is the catchment area is much smaller but nobody's leaving the area so they're spending their money in situ. But the spend and type of spend has fundamentally changed so spend on grocery markets which is the box that's highlighted in green there has gone through the roof where is dining out has really taken a hit. So if you look at a market a little bit outside of London a typical commuter market this is Feltham you can see Heathrow just above it and so on totally different situation. So this was pre-pandemic and that's during the pandemic virtually no change in terms of where the spend is coming from and interestingly this market was worth about 120 million pounds in spend pre-pandemic it's now worth 220 million because people aren't going anywhere they're spending where they live. So tracking this is going to be really really interesting to see how cities evolve where people are going to spend money what they spend it on and so on. And I think there's a risk that we over exaggerate the impact of the pandemic and say that's what it's going to look like in two three five years time and the reality is that spend is slowly going to drift back into the cities I'm convinced of that. So the only other point I wanted to highlight is around the labor crisis that we're facing in the 12 months ago we have never thought we're going to talk about a labor crisis a shortage of labor in hospitality. And in our sentiment survey we added that question in July and then immediately came in in second spot in the latest survey it stays in the second spot so this is a major major issue for the industry going forward. And you can see the scale of it seven and a half million or so jobs lost in April 2020 in the sector in the US in one month a hundred million jobs across the sector globally lost in 2020. The challenge here is not necessarily those immediate job losses although they're obviously painful for the individuals because a lot of those jobs will be required again in the future. The real challenge is around leakage of people out of the industry to work in supermarkets to become Amazon delivery drivers and they're never coming back. So that's the main concern that I have is that permanent leakage. So now if you look at the UK hospitality huge number of vacancies major major problem only lags health and social care at the moment. And if you actually look at that on a per hundred worker basis the hospitality industry is massively impacted and that's true in the UK but it's true in many many other markets so it's a really serious issue in terms of the recovery and not putting the brakes on the recovery as it starts to really gather steam. But the pandemic isn't the cause of this this was a major issue well before the pandemic I remember quoting in 2018 that 80% of major tourism markets were going to have a labor crisis by 2024. So the crisis has made it worse and it's accelerated but you know the aging of the population and the reduction of the workforce was already happening in Europe and this actually holds true in most major markets with the exception of Africa over the next 30 to 40 years. So what do we do about it? I think we need to be more creative in the war for talent so you see the cover page from The Economist there around the war for talent do we reach out to generations that typically would already be retired and bring them back in but bring them in a more flexible way so somebody who has a lot of experience a lot to give a lot to train they maybe want to work two four hour shifts in a week bring them back in and have everybody benefit from that. Because the issue as an industry that we have in terms of the recovery and being able to solve it is at the other end of the age spectrum so if you look at 17 to 18 year olds that are just about to come into the workforce and you look at that by industry so you've got the accommodation and catering industry there the bluish lines are the net vacancies by 2024 so the hospitality industry has a huge net requirement but the green line below it which is very small if you can't see it is the desirability for the sector by 17 to 18 year olds so we have a big need but nobody wants to come and work in our industry. So where do they want to work? Art and culture entertainment and sport let me translate they want to be on the X Factor they want to be Instagram famous or they want to be a footballer lots of kids want to do it and there's not a lot of jobs in that space. And I think this is really an issue for us as an industry to address and it's around storytelling of how do we get those 17 to 18 year olds to understand this is a fantastic industry you know it's global and you can move around the world and it has all types of jobs in it not just one type of job. So I know that ends on a slightly downbeat note but I think these are all key areas that we as an industry need to focus on to help the hospitality industry get back on its feet and evolve going forward. So that's all I had for you today.

When I think about when I hear this what about promoting inclusion because the younger and the future is inclusion and if you feel like there is a place where you feel included you want to work there and I would think you would get more younger people to come and they would not look at the X Factor or they would do both of them but I think inclusion more inclusion everywhere and really to show it and yeah more public.

I totally agree with you on that I think if you look at the industry traditionally it's been quite hierarchical general managers and certain types of levels within the organization I think what the industry and most businesses need to look towards is being more adaptable more nimble and allowing people to what we enjoy called bring your true authentic self to work right so you don't have to pretend to be something to fit into a certain hierarchy it's all about being adaptable flexible to address some of that so I totally agree and I think a lot of this is also around purpose and organizations having to be purpose-driven and not just saying something and not doing it but actually walking the walk as it were.

Good afternoon everyone it's a real pleasure and an honor and privilege to be back with you again I was last here in 2019 where as some of you will remember our key theme was sustainability. And we started to tackle the inherent problems that this industry faces when it comes to sustainability. And I think the Pandox team have done it again haven't they they've been taking you on a journey I don't know if you've noticed but there's been this funnel of information that has been coming your way and we're now moving to the bit where we start to evaluate some of the data and the bigger global drivers that you've listened to and the large scale mega impacts that we're all beginning to face and we're starting to drill down now into our industry and we've just had some great data there from Andreas and his team. And we want to add some color and to build on that through our understanding of how our consumer is continuing to evolve and grow. And we've already heard a couple of really important words here I think around this sense of growth because acceleration and exacerbation along with resilience seem to be the watchwords of the last 18 months. And indeed many of the things that we're now experiencing that seem to have been squeezed over the last two years were of course bubbling away under the surface or becoming more and more relevant in the late teens as we moved into this the transformational twenties. And it's a focus on not just understanding what we've been through but thinking about the bigger picture as we start to move into the inter-COVID era this transitional period that hopefully moves us through a trans as Ian was saying this isn't about bouncing back or taking the same trajectory this is trans this is a movement across it's a point of difference that we move away from and we move towards but we make a positive decision to do things differently. And this is what Cat and I Catherine and I would really like to talk to you about we're going to do this through six.

Yes, we are so accelerating trends today. We're going to look at six, and we're going to look at these through the lens of now: so what we expect to sort of bed in in 2022, then what is new, what we expect to be coming up in the next sort of one to three years in terms of new trends, new directions in consumer behaviors for you to be thinking about, the wider hotel and travel industries to be thinking about, and then what's next, a bit more future-facing, more towards the end of the decade, some of those exciting trends that will be upcoming. But we're going to start with thinking about the now, and slow travel, this slow tourism movement really starting to bed in as we move into the next year. There are several reasons why this is starting to happen. The first one, of course, the pandemic and also, of course, climate crisis. People are taking stock, they're thinking about the reasons why they travel now, and also, you know, what are those personal reasons, why is their particular trip relevant to them as well. We're seeing travel organizations respond, of course, with slower options, slower sort of itineraries for tourists, sometimes even helping you as a traveler think about things like the respect to the places that you're traveling to. One example is the Mindful Travel Co., which operates in Australia and New Zealand. They've got a really interesting take on this because they think about how to make travel not only meaningful but also more mindful for their customers, and their co-founders Emma Penfold and Laura Hughes note that our customers tend to be eco-conscious, sometimes they're spiritual, but mostly they're just looking for a well-deserved break. So it's balancing that eagerness that a lot of people have got to get back out there with also doing it in a more considerate way.

Now moving on, again still looking at this idea of what's happening right now as we move through our various pandemics. We're by no means over them all; it's an intercovered era. We have all begun to, I think, test ourselves or find resolve when it comes to resourcefulness in terms of staying healthy, being well, and thinking also about our mindfulness. And so for us, how we start to address these issues and also embrace them within the hospitality industry starts to become really interesting, because again it's one of these moves that takes us beyond the idea that when we address wellness we simply think of spa, and the solution is to put a couple of wet rooms and a massage table into our basement. That we actually think in a far more holistic way about what a mindful guest might want and look like and enjoy, and what a more 360-degree approach to wellness and the idea of health is going to be for our traveler moving forward, and that sense of how we start to combat our sedentary lifestyles and start to make a play, I think, towards a far more active cohort of travelers who really are thinking so much more holistically about the idea of staying well rather than just preventing illness. As we move through this transformational decade, the transformational 20s, the idea of how we start to place sport and fitness at the heart of our offering is going to be increasingly important in this decade moving forward. Indeed, according to the Global Wellness Institute, wellness travel is projected to reach 779 billion euros by 2022. Now that was actually a figure we got earlier this year, so it's a recent stat rather than a pre-pandemic one, and it's that sense of understanding and anticipating the market of growth in this particular area. So how we start to incorporate this newfound passion for physical hobbies into the tourism experience, I think, is about again this idea of how we embrace a new generation of travelers with new interests in mind and new points of focus. And we're seeing how the niche and the desire to become niche is also an opportunity within this particular category. So on screen we can see the Courts Hotel in California, which the whole hotel experience revolves around the idea that it is a tennis hotel, that's its raison d'être. And in fact, this idea that we become more niche in our outlook rather than more general, a game we believe is one of the guiding principles of the next 10 years. We find our points of difference, we understand as our consumer base continues to diversify rather than necessarily homogenize, we've got to be able to actually play to those key elements and those notes of diversification rather than sameness. The other example we've got here: Elman Groove Hotel in Costa Rica launching a program connecting professional surfers with guests, understanding what its authentic self, as Andreas identified, really is.

Okay, so from personal well-being, as Chris was just touching on, to that of the wider communities and planet, what we will actually start to see is this more regenerative solution coming through for travel as well. It's not that sustainability is going to go off the agenda, it's more that the conversation is evolving around this whole system approach to travel futures. So of course, aware of the climate crisis, by the mid-2020s we're going to see customers who are more conscious about traveling, but they're going to want the data to back that up. So when they're coming to hotels, when they're booking online, they're going to want to know that the destinations that they're landing into have maybe already done some of the work for them, but can also quantify maybe the impact of their stays, you know, when they're on the ground, how many local resources they're using, that sort of thing. We've already started to see the Eco Resort Collective, aptly titled Regenerative Travel, actually create an open-source white paper on its website for hotel groups to actually download and, you know, read through so they can actually understand better their planetary and social impact. And the co-founder of Regenerative Travel, Amanda Ho, notes that regeneration looks at everything from this whole system perspective, as we've just noted. It's about being able to prove through scientific fact that our hotels are creating an agenda of impacts that hotels themselves are thinking impact first, maybe not necessarily just about the experiences that they're offering; that is now part of the experience that they're offering. We're also seeing the Preferred Hotel Group, founded by Beyond Green, a platform for properties now really integrating these three pillars of sustainable tourism into all of the work that they do. And these are focused not only again on environmental practices but that bigger thinking, that whole system thinking: protecting cultural heritage, contributing to well-being of the local communities as well. But as Gun touched on, there's a bigger conversation here to think about under this umbrella of, you know, sustainability, and that's also intersectionality. It's thinking about who are your future customers. If we're thinking about sustainable travel, it's not necessarily affluent white people anymore. We have to think about how to engage new audiences, younger audiences, who, as we just noted, want to understand the impact of their trips. They have different reasons for traveling; they're traveling more for cultural and for ancestry rather than just to have a great beach holiday to Ibiza. One really great example, if you aren't yet aware of them, is a travel collective called Trippin. They very much focus on Generation Z, and their whole approach is to replace this idea of sustainable travel with purposeful travel instead. And they want to address that lack of intersectionality that has largely existed in this sustainable travel sort of movement so far to date, because as they say, right now there's an unlevel playing field for many intersectional travelers. If you're Black or Brown and you're traveling, you might not always feel welcome on what has been, quote unquote, a sustainable trip. So again, they're thinking and asking travel companies to think about what are their pillars of sustainable tourism and with this, how that also filters down to local communities.

Now moving on, again Andreas talked about the impact on the hospitality industry of the workplace, both in terms of business travel but also the idea of those that want to work with us. And it was 15 years ago that at the Future Laboratory we coined the term 'pleasure' to actually embrace and understand the fusing together of the business and the leisure traveler. And I think in tandem with a more sustainable approach to travel, we're beginning to see how consumers are increasingly drifting towards this idea of swapping short-term holidays for longer-term stays. And again, this was something we were definitely seeing pre-COVID: the rise of what we had called nomadism. And so the notion of the worker who is increasingly able to think more carefully about how they travel, about how long they can stay in a particular location because of the greater flexibility that many of us now have around our working patterns, is something that already hotel groups like the CitizenM have begun to pay attention to, providing companies with work-stay incentives such as meeting rooms, hotel rooms, and free drinks in order to bring people together and back into their hotel for both the professional time and also the leisure time to do it together. Meanwhile, the airline company United has partnered with Peerspace to create Team Together bundles, offering companies packages that include the return flights, the short-term workspace rentals, the collaborative spaces that bring teams the time to come together, the reason to actually come together to create that culture and to create the environment in which great new ideas can come to fruition. At the other end of the scale, we're also seeing how new luxury businesses like Musa on Mexico's Pacific Coast are designing properties specifically for this more nomadically minded traveler. The space will offer a hotel and individual living accommodation that really focuses on the idea of placemaking, on community, giving people the opportunity to experience the area before potentially deciding that this is where they may want to bed down roots and actually think about living. That's a really nice idea, and I've seen a few of these concepts starting to come through of people getting a test run about living in a space temporarily, seeing how they feel, maybe before actually moving there.

But now, when we're starting to look next, we're looking maybe more towards the end of the 2020s and where some of these travel trends could be headed. What is really quite exciting to see is how through data and travel insights, what we will start to see is not only itineraries but increasingly, of course, future hospitality experiences and even hotel design being founded on the data that hotel groups are tracking around user behavior, customer spend, where people are traveling, very similar to what we've been shared just previously. So this is where the expertise of the travel sector and that ability to read and infer data will unite to actually hone and create some really exciting new spaces. We've just seen one really interesting example in China: Alibaba's travel booking platform Fliggy recently used its extensive knowledge, of course, of the Chinese consumer base to create for the first time a three-day-long festival in the desert. And this was very much again targeted using Fliggy's search engine data at Generation Z. It was called the Desert Hertz Music Festival, and they understood that Gen Z right now in China, as we've touched on, want to understand their cultural heritage, they kind of want to get back in touch with their ancestry. And as part of this, they had music, dance, fashion, traditional hand-few dress at this festival for Gen Z to come and enjoy. So that was all just born from the data insights that they could see from their search engines. Elsewhere, Culture Trip, some of you may know of it, of course, the digital content platform for the travel industry, is translating its kind of editorial grasp, its reach of all of these local insiders that exist around the world, to actually create a whole new travel concept called Trips. It's for small groups, it's obviously especially targeting maybe friends who want to get back out and travel now but do something that feels much more local. As we again saw, data everyone's been very much focused on spending local, and so they want to translate that into their travel experiences now. So you get hooked up with local insiders who obviously show you all the hidden gems, very much in the vein of Culture Trip's own editorial.

So indeed, such data could actually really help us to maybe even accelerate some new travel hotspots. We could be reading this data to understand where we should be putting our investment or our focus next. And of course, some of these hotspots themselves might actually be a little bit ephemeral or transient even, so thinking about how we have to be much more flexible and also move with the time as travel brands, as travel companies. Showing this notion of transients already is 700,000 Hours, which is a nomadic hotel. It sets up for about six months every time it moves around the world. It's most recently been in Lake Como, it's been in Japan, and here it's very much encouraging those sort of high-spending customers to come and spend some time, again immerse themselves in local activities, whether it's in Japanese calligraphy or gardening, that sort of thing. But this hotel moving around the world and always seeking out and teasing its next location to obviously help build a bit of hype before it lands. Elsewhere, we're also seeing this start to push a little bit further afield when we start to think a little bit more future-facing again, towards maybe the end of the 2020s. The Athenea is the world's first floating hotel suite. This has a, it's basically a solar-powered pod that can kind of float around, it can navigate rivers, it can navigate seas. It has a circular bed, it has a saltwater or freshwater bathtub, its own solarium, so your own little private boat space that you can float around on, and it can of course anchor in any place its residents want to be until they're ready to move. But maybe pushing this to the even more extreme end is Ocean Sky. So we're looking actually for 2023 for the first launch of Ocean Sky. This is bringing a fresh approach to Arctic Circle tourism. It's the world's first helium aircraft, they're back ready to fly to the North Pole, and those 16 people who will be on this first trip on this Ocean Sky will be joined by Robert Swan, an explorer, for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. So again, this ability to kind of move around, enjoy these kind of hotels in these voyages that are again facing new frontiers, even as we look to the future. Indeed, and so we'd just like to end with this particular quote which we thought chimed very nicely with the idea of moving into the sort of the new horizon of travel opportunity and hospitality. And this is from Sylvia Karasu, who's a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical School in the United States, who recently told us: 'They already own the present. What else is left to buy but tomorrow? And the tomorrow after that. Suddenly the fetish of the super rich for space tourism starts to make sense. But it won't just be about space. It will be about our unexplored worlds, and it will be about how we discover parts of our world that we never thought we'd find or that we'd encounter.' And that, I think, is one of the most exciting opportunities that hospitality will have in the decade and the decades to come. Thank you.

It's like an English lesson: ephemeral. I wonder how many of you Swedish here who have used the Swedish equivalent to that word? Would you say about a hotel that it is emerged? Have you heard that? No. New term. You always learn. Gun, I wonder if you will stay in hotels as a private traveler more or less the coming years?

I would say more et cetera private less because I'll be working all the time.

So more in business. That's a logic answer, yeah. Which leads to: but if I wasn't working that much, I also would be traveling more private. More more, which means that you will increase your hotel stays.

Yeah, for business. Yeah, because during the pandemic, uh, it's for me, um, it's been more like a long-term vacation. I mean, that's how I have to see it. So I've been trying to really spoil myself and living in the hotels and enjoying myself and continuing being creative, creating music, producing. But definitely I will stay a lot more, and I am going every week back and forth staying in hotels in different countries, DJing as we speak.

What a good customer isn't she? Fine, excellent, excellent. So this leads to the results of the QR poll. I think we have them now. I hope so. Yes. As a leisure traveler, when will you stay at hotels as much as you did before? I already do: 36%. Yep. Draw your own conclusions, friends. This was as a leisure traveler. What about the business traveler? Can we see that? 43% in 2023, never again 20%. Was that what you expected? Just about okay. And the third question: how difficult is it for you to find the right staff today compared to before? Harder 47%, much harder 28%. We've got a problem here. Thanks for the poll answers. Um, very short. You've worked with Pandox before, yep, on a funny trip. Yeah, tell it very short. I don't know if a couple of you remember, if you were there, but five years ago we went to Kiruna. Is there anyone here that went to Kiruna? Yeah. Sure, okay. I remember Mr. Humboldt, he was dancing like crazy. Stefano, yeah. Um, we went first to Radisson by the airport, we had a pre-party, and then there was the destination unknown, and everyone flew up to Kiruna for a two-day party by the Ice Hotel in some Scandic hotel. And I remember everyone when I went up on the mountains with helicopters and had champagne. And I just remember with helicopter Pandora's champagne. Yeah, I love it. Very nice. I was waiting in the hotel. Um, I remember that. No, but I really remember with Pandox that it was so nice, like all the speaks. I remember Nissan 2 and the beautiful speaks and everything. It really hit me. Um, it was different from all the different corporate jobs that I do. And I remember that I really wanted to come back and play for a party. And there you are, and now I am back five years. Love you. So I'm really happy that you and now. And now we've got a panel coming in here. How good. Returning on stage: Liano, the sub from the bench. If I am honest, and I am Ruslan. Thank you very much for saying yes last night late. I could say no to join the panel. That was wonderful because James Mathison couldn't come. We have announced, yes, Mathison wonderful. You represent the HR Group in Germany with lots of hotels. And Robin, of course, Robin Rossman, serial visitor to the Pandora's Hotel Market Day, aren't you? It's a great event, yeah. It really is. Now a couple of questions to you, and I start with you, Robin. Sure. Uh, so I want to know now. Um, we talk so much about the pandemic. Will we really learn something from it and change anything? Will we?

I mean, there's a lot of things that have been talked about today that, you know, it's clear we need to have change, especially around the environment and how we take care of that. But I also think there are a lot of mega change trends that are talked about that they're not going to materialize in the shape that maybe they get talked about right now. Um, so I, you know, will more meetings be done digitally? Yes, well, well. Will more people choose to live outside of cities and commute? Some will, yes. But does that mean travel is dead and does that mean cities are dead? I think fundamentally not. Um, it's interesting if you look at some of the worst performing shares in the US at the moment, they are the likes of Zoom. Zoom share prices down 30% this year, Peloton down 60%. And the reason for that is their valuations were underpinned by assuming a growth trajectory that we've seen through the pandemic continuing. People were going to change the way that they did things forever. And that's not materializing, not in recent months. I'll give you another data point. So we have a business in the US called Apartments.com, it's a marketplace for renting apartments. And the long-term average occupancy of apartments in cities is around about 93%. And obviously during the pandemic people moved out of the city, occupancy rates went down. In the most recent month in the US, apartment rate occupancy is 95%. It's the highest occupancy rate we've ever seen in 30 years of data. So people are choosing to move back into cities. They're getting off their Peloton, they're traveling again. And things are returning to normal, for better or for worse, right? And I think that's something that, you know, has positive impacts but also it doesn't necessarily deal with some of the other challenges that have been raised today.

Perhaps I was a little unfair to you because I didn't give you the chance to explain. If you don't know what HR Group is, that's a huge hotel group in Germany now. You, I give you 30 seconds to tell what it is.

Thank you very much. Yeah, HR Group, it's a white label operator in Germany, asset-heavy, signing lease contracts with institutional investors, operating around 80 hotels in Germany and Central Europe, including like Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Spain. Uh, one of our big landlords is Pandox, as tenant, but also different institutional investors like Union Invest, Deka. And we are also owning a like part of the real estate. It's a privately owned company. And the asset-heavy may be interesting just in this connection. Now that you have 10 or 12 hotels in Vienna? No, I bought a Vienna House. It's a new brand, like it's a Vienna House. Okay, and then I thought you were very nasty as well. Uh, yeah, partly in Australia but not as, as okay. I bought a brand called Vienna House, yep. And we are talked over the leases, and now we are considering we are also partnering with different franchise partners like Aqua or or Hilton or yeah.

When you're in them, you feel like you're in Austria, yeah. Right, right. Sorry, now the same question to you. What do you really learn from this crisis we are going through, still going through?

Yeah, like also continue our cooperation first. The first lesson what I learned, like we have to be prepared for the worst can happen. And luckily for HR Group and thanks to Pandox and thanks to Anders Nissen, where he's not with us, and because of the pandemic also we lost him, uh, and thank you for that, like we had the first cooperation and Pandox trusted in me as a company, and we made the Celeste back in 2019, where it was in other hand a good timing to be prepared for our pandemic. But nevertheless, for our business model, this was one of the big lessons to learn, because it's not written by laws, nothing written by contracts, nothing little. It's cooperation between partners how to solve the issue together, uh, how to overcome this issue as two partners, in one hand as operator, as asset-heavy, but in the other hand as owner, how we can compete with this pandemic. And the worst thing like this took longer, and like with this salami process, you know, piece by piece, longer. Nevertheless, like how to be prepared stronger, like from the operational side, cutting cost, react, uh, taking care about the hotels and how to continue implementing digitalization, continue about ideas of food and beverage and so on.

What about what about Pandox, Liia? And is there a small talk in the office every day that no, we have to do like this instead, because we learned something?

Now Robin, you listened to Chris and Catherine from Future Lab. What they are saying, um, is that consequences of the pandemic, what they point out, or is it things that would happen anyway?

I mean, I think they started off, and I actually had the pleasure of chatting to them before the event. It is a lot of those trends were around before the pandemic, and it is around an acceleration and an investment into those areas, but they are still quite, they're very niche trends. Um, and I think there is a big mass market that won't change necessarily as fast as that. Um, although I will say the one thing, it was great listening to Ian Goldin earlier on, because just to hear him synthesize so succinctly all the changes that happened post-World War II, and realizing that those fundamental changes didn't happen in a year or two. And so even though coming out of World War II would have felt like we need to change things now, it took years and decades for that to play through. And I think we're in a similar place now where we all recognize the fundamental need to change things, and myself and I'm sure many are frustrated that it doesn't feel like we have the right path yet. But people often overestimate how much they can get done in a year and underestimate how much they could get done in a decade. And so I think if we're on the right trajectory, that you know, that's my hope.

You've been here the whole afternoon, right? Yes. Have you heard anything interesting? Everything was very interesting. What was interesting? Tell me about all the opinions, especially also with the end and with the understanding the global situation also about regarding how cities would look like, traveling and so on.

Well, I believe it will be change in the market, but I think it's direction. And also I agree with what means about restarting like or going back to the path. I think there will be adjustment, like how we are integrating and how we see our recovery process. And it was quite fast in our hotel portfolio that we see secondary locations, uh, or or today institutional investors, they are looking on leisure market. Well, if I was talking to these institutional investors some years ago, they would never want to hear about the leisure market or to invest in leisure markets, especially in Europe. And to see this kind of hotels where you can adjust business hotel as also leisure destination to prepare like for family traveling, uh, create like kind of offices like that, people with family can travel between cities and the kids can go around, and you integrate this kind of philosophy in your hotels. And these things that we use soon, soon.

Same question to you, Leah, just a moment. Did you hear anything special today that you liked, that you thought, ah, didn't know that, or that was interesting?

I think everything was interesting. To know a little bit how in general you work from the perspective from you as a landlord and Pandox in the hotels, because I'm also the head of marketing of Stockholm Pride, so I'm the one putting the pressure from an inclusion point of view on the hotels, how you work in the business with your staff, but also how you can promote yourself without looking like you're pinkwashing, you know? And pinkwashing means you're just using the LGBTQ logo to look good, you actually don't do anything for it. So this was interesting to me, I got a lot from that. Yeah, and then it was this ephemeral pop-up hotel, ephemeral, yeah, the pop-up hotel idea. I thought was very interesting.

What about you, Leah? Uh, you are the one behind all this. Yeah, what's interesting?

Okay. Hand on your heart, all three of you. It depends what you're gonna say. All three. This is a question where the answer demands total honesty. Okay. Okay. Um, I don't want to go back to how it was before. Agree or not?

Uh, I mean from a sustainability perspective, definitely not.

Are you prepared for the change?

Uh, I'm prepared for the change, yes. Yeah, yeah. But I learned to, I need to learn from the past and we are human beings, we still want to travel, we just want to be there. Then I would like to learn from the past for the future.

Will Pandox go in the front now?

Now, Liia, I haven't prepared you for this one, but all people are curious. All people out there are curious. We will of course have a Hotel Market Day next year as well, absolutely. And then we will sum up all the changes there have been. Will we? We will try. I'll talk to Mr. Berg and Mr. Axe, who's the sort of brains behind this, and then Eric, yes. Yeah, they're the heroes of this day, and will take all those. So I guess the Hotel Market Day will go on forever, forever. Is that right? Forever, yeah.

Well, time's running. Okay. Thank you very much for sharing your views, opinions with us. Robin, Ruslan, and Leo, of course. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you.

Now there will be a slight change in the program, and nobody knows about it, almost not even good. But the thing is that, excuse me, you online watchers now, your online guests, this is about you who are here. Uh, due to a technical problem, you were not able to see the video, right, about Andersson which we started with when I announced the tribute to Anders. I understood after because I could see it on my screen but you couldn't. So the suggestion from Gabardine, our production company, is that we just run it once again so you can see it. You can see it once again if you like. Okay. Are you with us? Yes, fine. Thank you.

For play with your per team, spiritual family at the San Jose. The first half of 2021 has been really challenging. We lost our cherished leader Anders Nissen to the illness. Anders was a very inspiring person. I would say he was kind of a king of the hotel business. His attitude was always can do. If there was a counterwind, he would say let's force even more. Every day try to find something that we can do better and try to improve yourself. Have fun, go to the job with a smile in the morning. That leadership is super important. As a person, Anders was very caring, he was fun, but he was very, very determined. He was bold, very competitive, but yet very people-centric. So everybody felt seen, everybody felt included. You always can improve yourself, and if you have that appetite, things normally go well.

Okay, that was it. Thank you. Um, I like a conference where you also have a piece of news. So now we are going to deliver a piece of news. We are going to launch something real new. And this is made public for the first time in this very moment. And the one who will do it is the handball legend Stefan Lövgren.

Thank you, John, and hello everybody. Uh, I'm the only one here today who not talk about trends or hotel market or interesting things for the hotel owners. But I will talk about Anders Nissen. We all knew Anders, or to be honest, we all were hit by Anders. Some of us physically on the shoulder, of course, in his friendly way, but also hit by his enthusiasm, his energy, his business skills, and his passion of handball, and in particularly in talents and the next generation of handball players. To honor the memory of Anders, the foundation M9 has been instituted. And I am really proud, together with Staffan Wilson and the son of Anders, Oscar Nissen, to be in the board of M9 Foundation. For those of you who don't know handball, and that's okay, M9 is an expression for the playmaker in handball, and Anders was a true playmaker. I would like to express my deepest recognition and gratitude to the anchor donations from Ola Nissen and Pandox to the M9 Foundation. It will be a privilege for me to set Anders' ideas in force through the foundation, which aims to support, encourage, and develop handball talents, coaches, but also new ideas within business development which can make the sport handball grow. So I hope that you will follow the journey of this foundation, and through that, the memory of Anders. You can get the contact details of course speaking to me or Stefan during or after this session, or having done from some of your Pandox friends. Normally I would end now and say thank you, but after getting hit by Anders, he learned to add and always end: what's next? And I really don't know what's next. But with that, I would like to say thank you for the shortest time on the stage tonight, and that was my time. Thank you very much.

How many do you think that this is a good idea? All of you. How good? Great. Okay. We're approaching the end. We're not really done yet, but um, the program says that I now have a 25-minute session for personal reflections and summary. No, I'm only joking. I have a couple of minutes for that, but I have nothing to tell you that is better than what we've already heard from the speakers. So I just want to know, it may be that one or two of the speakers already have left. Leo is of course not with us now because he was online, but is Ian still here? Ian Goldin, are you here? Yeah, fine. Stand up, please. Where are you? I didn't see you. Sorry. There you are. Great. Andrea Scriven, are you here? You stand up too. And what about Chris and Catherine? You still here? Stand up, please. Okay. Now, please deliver for these people a sitting ovation. Okay. Thanks a lot. I think also the moderator deserves... Please wait a moment, please wait a moment. Wait a minute, please wait, because I have one person who is more important, even more important. And that is somebody who has been here listening carefully, being kind of the architect behind the Hotel Market Day for many, many years, behind Anders Nissen, always serving with good advice, good input, uh, intelligent comments, also to me this time. And I think Bengt Putin is in the room. There he is. Please, Bengt Putin. Yes, you may come up on stage because you deserve a second ovation as well. Okay. I don't have a microphone for you, but thank you for everything you've done for us, supporting me and the Hotel Market Day. Thank you. Can I say something without a microphone? Very strong, very short. Very short. Okay.

Actually, when we started the Hotel Market Day many years ago, 26 years ago, they were founded on two thoughts of Anders. The first one was, like understood in Pandox that in Pandox we need to know the hotel industry and what's influencing the whole industry. That knowledge is so important. The second thought, and I'm coming to my point, was that that knowledge, or at least part of it, we should share with others in our environment. Exactly. And that was actually the base for the Pandox Hotel Market Day. Yeah, yeah. And you have really checked up that this is what we're doing all the time. I've done that. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And since I'm the head moderator, she's only the sidekick, okay? So I decide. So I decide that it was a fantastic pleasure, a great fun to work with Gun Lundemo. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Brilliant. Okay, okay. You can do better than that, yo Lipscomb. Thanks a lot. Thank you. So there will be some great music at the end, I think. Yeah, yeah. We also did like a blue. Thank you for listening, thank you for coming, thank you for being with us online all the time. And see you on the next Hotel Market Day. Thanks a lot.