Hilton’s Nassetta Kept Faith in Travel During Dark Days of Covid

(Bloomberg) -- Even during the darkest days of pandemic lockdowns, Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Christopher Nassetta was confident that demand for business travel would recover. 

“There is an unstoppable force that exists with humans,” Nassetta said in a Bloomberg Television interview with Carlyle Group Inc. co-founder David Rubenstein. “They want to network, they want to grow their business, to build relationships. And so I have no real worries.”

Other highlights from the interview, recorded Dec. 1, are below:

• On hotel stocks, which have bounced back from 2020 lows: “I think it’s an underlying belief that the business will come back and will, ultimately, over time, grow to be greater than it was before.”
• On the lodging industry’s ability to find workers after mass layoffs early in the pandemic: “The single biggest issue that we have is getting labor back into the hotels broadly, but particularly in certain roles, like housekeeping and the culinary areas.”
• On tipping housekeepers, which Nassetta said most guests don’t do: “My responsibility is to not rely on customers, who feel like they’re paying already, to tip our housekeepers, but for us to make sure that we’re taking care of our housekeepers.”
• On being recruited to run Hilton after its acquisition by Blackstone Inc. in 2007: “Jon Gray called and said, ‘I’ve got the perfect job for you. We know you. We like you. We trust you. We think you’ve sort of trained your whole career to be able to run a company like this.’”
• On his future at Hilton: “I’m going to do it for the foreseeable future. I love what I do. This business, I would still say, is like a coiled spring coming out of Covid, particularly. So I feel like we just have more to do. My job’s far from done.”

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