“Uncertainty is the only certainty we have,” said Elie Maalouf, CEO, IHG Hotels & Resorts, as he spoke about leadership strategies at the IHIF EMEA in Berlin on Monday.
“Every year I am unsure what the uncertainty will be, but it happens,” he told interviewer Estelle Weingrod, head of European leisure, entertainment & hotels, JP Morgan. “Last year it was tariffs, this year, conflict in the Middle East.” In the current scenario, he said, the top priority was the “safety and security of guests, colleagues and properties”, noting that the real estate aspect of hospitality meant there was always an element of physical risk, “from conflict to climate issues”.
With regard to the outlook for the troubled Middle East, he said he was “confident” that it would recover, remarking on the “strength of the region”. He said: “Its leadership will bring it back – this is an interruption, not a change in the region’s growth trajectory”. He compared the current crisis to the pandemic, when business leaders expressed fears that “people wouldn’t travel again – well, they travelled”.
Industry upside
As a leader in hospitality, he said that on the whole he observed that “the upside in this industry is greater than the downside”. He added: “There are always events that happen every year; but every year, travel still grows.” In 2025, for example, there was a 12-day war in the Middle East as well as other geopolitical tensions, but global travel volumes grew year-on-year. “If you are a large operator and working across multiple segments, broadly diversified, it matters less where people are travelling, as long as they are travelling,” he said. “Travel won’t end.”
A greater risk for hospitality specialists, in fact, is “missing out on the upside”, he said. Tackling this issue required an eye for detail, he explained, particularly because the industry in North America and Europe had been subject to rising costs since the conclusion of the pandemic, including “energy, wages, insurance”. At IHG, “procurement teams cover over 1000 items for our hotels, drawing up global agreements”, he said, making sure that “rooms are the most efficient they can be”. He said that a revenue management system driven by artificial intelligence (AI) that the firm implemented last year was “driving demonstrably better RevPAR globally”, and that the tool was free to its owners worldwide. “We are always working to optimise costs,” he underlined.
Trends shaping hospitality
Looking at the trends shaping hospitality, he expressed positivity over the industry’s “structural tailwinds”. Chief among them, he said, was the “preference of experience over things”. This was particularly notable in Asia and the Middle East, where customers were selecting experiences much more than buying products. “The more they live in a virtual, digital or artificial world, the more they crave live experiences,” he said. In the wake of the success of the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina, he noted that live sports remained hugely popular, as well as live concerts, inspiring the revival and return of past performers too. With restaurants and bars completing the list of the most popular experiences, he said that “hospitality is the ultimate live experience that brings all that together”. He added: “Everything that is important in life happens in a hotel at some point. We have to make sure that experiences are really good because people are willing to pay for them.”
In terms of expansionary trends, meanwhile, he noted that “growth rates are moving east”. The further development of airports in markets such as India, China and South East Asia would be crucial for this, while the expansion of the middle classes in such markets was also fundamental. “Some sixty percent of our pipeline is east of Europe, which also drives growth west,” he said.
A final determiner of growth was longevity and health, he said, with people living longer than ever before. “Greater health and life spans contribute to more travel,” he said. “Travel is among the top three priorities in this particular generation.” He added that hotel operators would have to learn how to take advantage of that, to structurally position themselves for travel growth, and lean more into leisure.