Guest Speaker: Kannan Sankaran

Guest Speaker: Kannan Sankaran

Kannan Sankaran is a Managing Director at CBRE Hotels. Mr. Sankaran is a distinguish alumna of the George Washington University. During the session, he shared his experience working at CBRE, company with which has been working for eight teen years, since his first semester as a MTA student at GW.

CBRE, is one of the biggest commercial Real Estate Organization in the world.

The presentation developed by Mr. Sankaran cover two main topics that were hotel Industry Trends, where he exposed the main “economic variables tied to hospitality industry performance” (Sankaran, 2017), that included: occupancy rate, average room rates and revenue per available room. The second topic covered was Hotel Market Research, being the latest the main theme addressed in this paper.

Hotel Market Research is quite a broad topic that includes internal and external resources. One of the most relevant divisions is the Feasibility Studies that are commissioned for evaluating the viability of developing a project by tracking and comparing hotel performance versus the economic metrics in different markets also with the forecasting of new products (projections estimate that in the next 2-3 years about 3000-4000 hotel rooms will be release in the DC area). Some of the issues involved to develop this kind of consultancy management include external and internal resources like: financial statements, location, type of product, market category, direct and indirect competitors (an example of the latest is how Airbnb is affecting the demand and occupancy rate of classic hotels), taking into account the impact of properties that are operating and the ones that will open soon and complementary market that are other properties or industries that will benefit with the launch of the property.

Additionally, Mr. Sankaran spoke about