45th Annual NYU International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference Agenda

Fifth Floor, Westside Ballroom
Enjoy a tasty breakfast with colleagues, as you prepare for an enlightening day that will focus on changes and trends in the industry.

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom
The signals conflict. Occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR are up. New construction is down—to 2015 levels. Looking ahead, demand is expected to rise, but so may interest rates. Join these leaders as they discuss the imperatives for hoteliers to successfully navigate the uncertainty ahead and the opportunities for shrewd investors to find opportunity in the hotel industry.

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom
There are owners, there are brands, and there are owners who own their brands; each brings a unique perspective to the table. To these leaders, who have successfully steered their various organizations through the acute phase of the pandemic, we ask: what now?  Join these thought leaders for a thought-provoking discussion.

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom
ChatGPT and AI, pandemic aftermath, inflation, war, political tensions, social media fragmentation, robotics, space travel, the evolution of the American workforce: these are challenging and stimulating times for lodging and travel industry organizations.  And in times of volatility, leadership counts.  Join these seasoned industry leaders as they share, compare, and contrast their thinking on the big picture.

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom
Brands, management, and ownership: the seat of power in the lodging industry is triangular in shape.  The dynamics and tensions among its 3 sides create the momentum that takes the industry forward.  With technology, ESG, and DEI front and center in the news, hear from these leaders where their focus lies, what we can expect in the months ahead, and what is top of mind today.

Fifth Floor and Sixth Floor Foyers
Meet Conference sponsors, as well as other industry leaders. Network as you reenergize with refreshments in the Exhibitor Areas.

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom
The Industry Real Estate Finance Advisory Council (IREFAC), annually presents an award to an individual in the hospitality community who has shown remarkable business acumen in leading their organization to new levels of financial success. 

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom
IREFAC is a highly respected organization, operating under the American Hotel & Lodging Association umbrella. Its members convene twice a year to discuss the latest deals, industry occurrences, and trends.  In addition, many IREFAC participant firms provide the funding that enables deals to come to fruition.  This session affords Conference attendees an “inside look” at an IREFAC meeting. The latest (and greatest) from IREFAC.

The Conference’s concurrent workshops focus on specialized topics of interest, allowing attendees to customize their experience, while gaining critical industry information from interactive panel discussions. 

Fifth Floor, Belasco and Broadhurst in the Juilliard Complex
Pandemic, recession, recovery, inflation: no matter the headlines, lodging properties are still trading.  But this is a function of the market’s fluidity.  Hear from these seasoned experts about current investment market dynamics: who’s buying, who’s selling, what’s happening to pricing, and where is the capital coming from.  And of particular interest: what can we expect for the rest of the year?

Fifth Floor, Salon 2 in the Juilliard Complex
The luxury hotel market continues to be the gold standard for the industry. Panelists explore the latest trends in the sector, how to incorporate them into your hotel, and what’s on the horizon.

Fourth Floor Ziegfeld
It's one thing to make broad forecasts about the future health of the hotel industry, it's another thing to evaluate opportunities in the short-term. The recent rebound in hotel revenues and profitability is promising, but the horizon is clouded by tech layoffs, work from home trends, inflation, and other political and economic risks. Hear from the professionals dealing with how to assess deals on a day-to-day basis where many underwriting risks might derail the best laid plans.

Fourth Floor, Wilder
Lifestyle hotels have transcended the traditional lodging industry segmentation structure, and are found at increasing numbers of price points, development costs, and locations.  New lifestyle brands continue to be rolled out, but soft branding platforms permit owners to create individual identities for individual hotels, which feels like it’s not branding at all.  How does this all work? Why are lifestyle hotels proliferating, what does a lifestyle brand need to work, and what’s next?  Join these market players as they share their views.

Fourth Floor, Odets
As we experience a significant labor shortage, a culture where the notion of on-site work has waned in popularity, and a society that is thinking about 4-day work weeks, strategies for talent management are becoming more and more critical at every level of the lodging industry.  Is attention to DEI-related issues part of the answer and if so, what are the exact strategies that are being deployed? Would an increasingly diverse lodging industry ownership base help and if so, how do we get there?  Do we need to re-think the workforce paradigm in its entirety and, if so, what would a different one look like? Join these experts as they share what they are thinking and seeing in the talent management arena.

Fifth Floor, Booth and Edison in the Lyceum Complex
Rising land costs, rising labor and materials costs, financing increases – developing in today’s world is clearly a challenging ordeal. This panel will explore what development deals are getting done, from economy to upscale, luxury to all-inclusive, one-off assets to larger mixed-use projects. Panelists will address the challenges they are facing as well as mitigants, and hopefully shed light on how development deals continue to get done in the face of such market adversity.

Fifth Floor, Salon 4 in the Lyceum Complex
There is no hotel investment thesis without revenue. But optimizing a hotel’s revenue today takes digital savvy, whether it’s choosing the right booking engine or OTA, adopting the right revenue management platform, or looking at total revenue optimization tools.  This panel includes experts from both the tech and the hotel operations sides to share ideas on best practices for optimizing a hotel revenue at the asset level.

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom
The footprint of the lodging industry 3 to 5 years from now is being sculpted in the here and now.  These individuals directly determine, in their everyday lives, what that future looks like.  Join these veteran development leaders as they discuss how they marry their corporate imperatives with market realities to forge an actionable strategy.  What kinds of deals are getting done, where they are getting done, and how?  

Sixth Floor, Broadway Ballroom