Tinu Sebesanu, Trend Hospitality: “The ones that continue to have no profit should sum up the loss and run for it!”
September 23, 2009 – 10:43 am | by admin
Tinu Sebesanu, the CEO from Trend Hospitality, says that obtaining profit is no longer the main objective in the hotelier industry, the most important aspect in the new economical context is maintaining the business above the float line.
“The first signs of the international situations were beginning to show, in Romania, in May 2008. Then we started seeing the decay in the number of people that spent a night at a hotel, especially in Bucharest, where if somebody sleeps at a hotel, it is usually a businessperson. As the number of the businesses decreased, the smaller the number of people sleeping in a hotel became. However, many saw that they still had a profit and they did not look ahead. Everybody was making a comparison with 2007, the best year that the hospitality business had ever had, a year that will not come again ten years from now.”
In this context, the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers came in the same manner as the disaster from 9/11, a sudden but extremely serious explosion, which everybody thought that it will have consequences but nobody thought about how big they will be. If 9/11 changed the face of the world, the Lehman bankruptcy will entirely change the economical market. From Friedman to these days, it was a general opinion that the financial market auto fixes itself and now the situation is no longer the same. The financial sector will become once more one of the firsts on the floating line, as for the hospitality business that was first to enter the crisis, it will also be the last to come out of it. The hotels are a barometrical business, and its 25% decrease actually shows the real fall of this year’s economy.
Many have entered under a break-even from the spring and they will keep bringing money from personal founds until they will have no more. I think that the ones that will resist in paying with their debts and wages until May 2010 will be the ones that will escape this situation. Now, the ones that are most affected are the independent hoteliers, that own small hotels and of an inferior category. Because the signs of the crisis developed the largest combat of cross segments: five stars hotels took the clients from four stars hotels, the four stars ones – from three stars ones, and the three stars hotels remained without clients and now they are desperate.
Nobody talks about profit now; instead, they talk about how to maintain themselves on the floating line. This is difficult, considering that there is still a long way to the bottom of the sack. The results from September will be definitely – if they still show a decrease, I think that the ones that continue to have no profit should sum up their costs and run for it! Because they will grow in debt even more, even though they will never admit it. Because that’s the way Romanians are, they don’t accept in a million years that they’ve went bankrupt!”
Source: www.businessmagazin.ro
Tags: accomodation in bucharest, bucharest apartments, bucharest hotels, bucharest short term rental, hotel market, Tinu Sebesanu
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