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An employee passes a logo in the reception area of InterContinental Hotels Group’s headquarters in Denham, U.K.
There’s a degree of optimism in the U.S. travel market despite the bumpy political backdrop of recent months, the chief executive of British hotel giant, IHG, told CNBC on Monday.
Richard Solomons was speaking at the International Hotels Investment Forum in Berlin the day after the news that U.S. President Donald Trump had revised his controversial travel ban against citizens from Muslim-majority nations to give it a greater chance of pushing through the national court system.
The new executive order retains a 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. by citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen but now only targets those who are new visa applicants and also removes Iraq from the list.
The CEO of the group, which counts brands including InterContinental Hotels and Crowne Plaza under its umbrella, said that U.S. politics had not yet seemed to have impacted business negatively.
“Not so far, it’s not something we’ve seen yet and I guess we’ll have to see what happens over time. For us and actually for a lot of the travel industry we are a very domestic business…So these things could have an effect but what could have a bigger effect actually is how fast the economy grows,” Solomons told CNBC, adding that the optimism wasn’t confined to North America.
“Fundamentally, not just in the U.S. but also in China actually and to some extent here in Europe, we’re seeing quite a lot of bullishness and we’re signing literally more deals that we have done since 2008,” he revealed.
