We will recover from the coronavirus pandemic: Hilton CEO

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With 25 years plus of executive leadership logged in the pressure cooker that is the hotel business, Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta has seen a good number of crises wreak havoc on his industry.

There was the sharp drop-off in travel in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The SARS outbreak in the early 2000s didn’t do the lodging industry any favors. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 hammered consumer spending and raised borrowing costs for the hotel chains that feast on cheap debt to fund expansion.

That royally sucked.

From a Hilton perspective, Nassetta rode into a company as CEO in 2007 that was saddled with enormous debt right after its $26 billion private equity buyout by Blackstone. Some 18 months into the top job, Nassetta found himself being a war-time CEO — battling the Great Recession, a lethargic corporate culture that required sweeping layoffs to fix and a lot of debt that had to be overcome through a clear growth plan.

All that had to be addressed before Nassetta was to become CEO of a public company via a hotly anticipated IPO in 2013 (it was successfully executed — the stock gained 143% from the December 2013 IPO to the late December 2019, pre-coronavirus outbreak peak).

In short, Nassetta has been through more battles than a CEO 20 years his senior (the guy is 56 years old). But now the war-time CEO finds himself back in the tank commanding the good ship Hilton — operating 6,000-plus hotels worldwide — through a situation that, by his own admission, is unlike anything he has ever witnessed before.

Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta is no stranger to managing through crises.

That would be the coronavirus pandemic that has brought global travel to a grinding halt and rendered hotel chains mere ghost villages camping out in urban and suburban locales.

“What is different about this is that it’s globally synchronized and it is deeper than anything we have ever seen in terms of impact in the business. People keep saying this is unprecedented, and it is. We have seen the most dramatic declines in the history of our business,” Nassetta tells Yahoo Finance in an exclusive interview.

Unprecedented may be an understatement. More like mind-blowingly shocking to even the casual follower of financial statements and stocks.

Hilton said in an April 16 update that system-wide revenue per available room — a key industry metric known as RevPar — declined in a range of 22% to 24% in the first quarter. The stats from the first quarter and April month-to-date are unsettling to put it lightly:

  • First quarter RevPar: Americas (-20% to -22%); Europe, Middle East & Africa (-20% to -22%); Asia Pacific (-43% to -45%).