IHG CEO discusses how GDP and the middle class drive travel demand and growth

Well, thanks Brad. It's great to be with you. You know, the amazing thing about travel is despite uncertainty around the world, you may have trade tensions and some turbulence across many different sectors, travel continues to grow. The predictions are for travel to increase domestically in the United States this year over the summer. UN Tourism just reported last week that international travel in Q1 of 2025 was up 5% over 2024. I mean, this is despite all the tension out there, 5% growth. Now, they may be going to different parts of the world, but people are moving, people are traveling. Business travel is back up, groups and meetings travel is back up. The World Travel and Tourism Council reported that last year was a record year for global travel and tourism. This year is going to be another record year. Uncertainty is the only thing we can be certain about, Brad. It's always going to be there, but people love to travel.

Look, we have 145 million members in IHG One Rewards now. Up nearly 50% since five years ago, and it's growing double digits a year. These are people that want to travel with IHG's 20 brands, 6,700 hotels around the world. Another 2,300 we have under development. Shared home rentals is a real business, been around a long time. Used to be just, you know, friends talking to friends or people looking in the newspaper and finding that shared home rental. So, it's not a new business. It's just now on technologically advanced platforms and doing quite well. They're kind of different businesses, right? They've prospered over the last 10 years and hotels have continued to prosper. So there is some concentric overlap in some places, but you go to London, you go to New York City, you go to Paris, you go to Miami, you go to Tokyo, hotels are busy, hotels are full, and shared home rentals are doing well. It's really not competing in the same sphere for consumers right now.

We get that question a lot because there's a lot of talk about, you know, the consumer mindset, the consumer sentiment. There are two sort of hard to reconcile things going on right now. Consumer sentiment surveys, except for the one that came out last week in the US, have been down. Consumer spending has been up. Why? Unemployment is low, employment is strong, job reports continue to be strong, GDP continues to grow, bank balance sheets, corporate balance sheets, and residential home balance sheets are in good shape. Real wages are growing. So in general, the consumer behavior is actually much better than what they say their sentiment is, which is really what we want to see. And then when we look through our portfolio, we actually don't see the trade down. We see our upper end, our luxury and ultra luxury doing very well. We see our everyday travel, Holiday Inn Express, Holiday Inn, Avid, Atwell doing very well. If you look at our first quarter revenue report that we put out at the end of the first quarter in April, what did we see? We saw 7% RevPAR growth at InterContinental. We saw three and a half percent RevPAR growth at Holiday Inn Express. Both ends doing pretty well.