Hospitality Leadership Summit 2021 | Boston University SHA

Executive summary

The summit’s central message was that hospitality’s recovery depends less on discounting or adding technology than on rebuilding trust through transparency, human service, employee empowerment, and a clearly defined guest value proposition. Peter Greenberg argued that the pandemic created a rare opportunity to reset business models and operations. Danny Meyer described how Union Square Hospitality Group used the crisis to reassess its economics, hiring, compensation, and inclusion practices. Both speakers said the industry can emerge stronger if it uses the disruption to make structural changes.

Peter Greenberg: Restoring trust and redesigning hospitality

Strategy and operating principles

• Prioritize value over the headline rate. Guests will pay more when they understand what they are getting; hidden fees and opaque policies erode trust. Greenberg’s shorthand: “It’s not the rate, it’s the value.”
• Replace assumptions with direct conversation. Greenberg criticized conventional focus groups for asking whether customers would travel, but not whether they wanted to. Businesses should talk with guests and understand their underlying concerns.
• Treat the pandemic as a business-model reset. Greenberg urged companies to discard pre-pandemic algorithms and projections when their assumptions no longer hold, and to rethink pricing, service, operations, and the guest experience.
• Empower frontline staff to resolve problems. Employees should be trusted to make empathetic, practical decisions rather than being constrained by rigid “no waivers, no favors” rules.
• Make processes visible. Guests want reassurance about how rooms, linens, dishes, and other spaces are cleaned—not just a claim that a property is clean.

Practical playbooks and recommendations

• Build a “security blanket” into the guest experience. Clearly explain cancellation, refund, insurance, health, and safety policies before purchase. Avoid forcing guests to discover exclusions after the fact.
• Disclose the full price upfront. Greenberg supported businesses setting their own fees, but argued that required fees should be clearly disclosed rather than added late in the booking process.
• Revisit physical design and usability. He recommended practical hotel-room improvements, including better lighting, safe bathroom flooring, usable bathroom space, intuitive controls, and work-friendly layouts with sufficient desk space, outlets, and genuinely high-speed internet.
• Use reservations to manage amenities. Hotels can offer gym and spa access by appointment, giving guests more predictable access and helping manage capacity.
• Rework destination marketing. Destination marketing organizations should shift from simply promoting destinations to presenting practical choices and explaining what visitors can expect.
• Spread demand to reduce overtourism. Destinations can reduce seasonality by encouraging year-round travel rather than concentrating visitors in peak periods.
• Coordinate across government agencies. Greenberg called for agencies, including Commerce, Transportation, and Treasury, to work together on travel policy, security, transparency, and business conditions. He also advocated common standards and a central clearinghouse for vaccine credentials and related travel documentation.
• Reconsider who is responsible for tourism. In developing countries, he urged governments to appoint tourism leaders with relevant expertise rather than treating tourism as a secondary portfolio.

Examples

• London hotel minibar experiment: A hotel replaced paid minibars with real refrigerators stocked with complimentary refreshments, then raised room rates by $30 per night. Greenberg said occupancy increased 17%, illustrating how a stronger perceived-value proposition can outperform a low advertised rate paired with costly add-ons.
• Hotel brands and differentiation: Greenberg argued that large hotel portfolios risk weakening their brands when consumers cannot distinguish among them. Loyalty points and reservation systems alone may not create genuine brand loyalty; service and clearly differentiated standards matter.
• Work-from-anywhere stays: He described extended stays in vacation homes as an example of changing work and travel behavior. Hotels seeking this business need appropriate workspaces, reliable internet, food options, and services that make a longer stay worthwhile.
• Airbnb operations: Greenberg said independent hosts need credible, consistent ways to meet cleanliness and safety expectations. He questioned whether platform-level assurances alone were sufficient.

Travel-market outlook and metrics cited

Greenberg cited the following figures and forecasts during the discussion:

• Travel and tourism represented roughly one in 10 jobs and, before the pandemic, one in five new jobs. He said 65 million jobs had been affected.
• He said 34% of hotels were technically facing foreclosure and that 1,500 New York City restaurants had closed and might never reopen.
• He cited $9 billion in airline refunds still owed to travelers roughly a year into the pandemic.
• He said the U.S. Department of Transportation received record numbers of complaints in 2020, especially about refunds and travel insurance.
• He cited 1.3 million TSA-screened passengers on a day in early 2021, the highest figure since February 2020 at that point.
• He described recovery as uneven: domestic leisure travel was expected to return before long-haul international business travel, while meetings and conventions could lag because they are booked years ahead. His estimates were:
  • Leisure travel by 2022
  • Long-haul international business travel around July or August 2022
  • Meetings and conventions around 2023
• He cited route expansion by leisure-oriented carriers during the downturn: Southwest announced 18 new routes, Frontier 90, and Sun Country 60, with examples focused on leisure destinations rather than major business centers.
• His broader warning: Discounting cannot overcome fear. Businesses need to restore confidence and demonstrate value before expecting demand to return.

Danny Meyer: People, culture, and a more resilient business

Leadership framework

Meyer described a hospitality business as serving five stakeholder groups:

• Employees
• Guests
• The community
• Suppliers
• Investors

His view was that the business succeeds when all five groups have reason to support its success. He also emphasized that hospitality is not limited to guest interactions: employees must feel that they belong and are valued, too.

Crisis-response playbook

• Focus on what the organization can control. When Union Square Hospitality Group closed its restaurants in March 2020, Meyer asked his team to consider what they could learn, how they would behave, and which values would guide their decisions.
• Use the shutdown as “dry dock.” He treated the period as an unusual chance to inspect the business and fix weaknesses, including outdated assumptions about rent, labor, compensation, and operating models.
• Maintain communication and care during layoffs. Meyer said the company stayed in contact with former employees, provided practical support, and tried to help people find other work.
• Use technology to extend hospitality, not replace it. The crisis pushed restaurants to develop takeout, delivery, food shipping, and other formats, while Meyer stressed the continuing importance of in-person connection.

Hiring, inclusion, and employee practices

• Meyer said his restaurants assess candidates for both role-specific skills and hospitality aptitude. He characterized a cook’s technical ability as 49% of the hiring decision, with emotional skills or a high “hospitality quotient” making up the other 51%.
• He said the group aims to hire teams that reflect the communities where they operate, and argued that diverse teams improve decision-making and help attract a broader clientele.
• The group accelerated diversity and inclusion goals that had been set for 2025 to 2021, and began publishing its goals and progress publicly, with regular updates.
• Meyer distinguished between being non-racist and being actively anti-racist, saying the company needed to move toward the latter.
• He described employee-first policies—including health care and other benefits—as part of building a stronger organization, not simply as employee perks.

Compensation and operating economics

• Meyer said restaurants face pressure from rising rent, rising wages, and competition that constrains menu pricing. He argued that models relying on lower labor and real-estate costs were increasingly unsustainable even before the pandemic.
• He supported a $15 minimum wage, while arguing that wage levels should account for regional differences in living costs.
• Tipping model: After running a “hospitality included” model for about five years, Meyer’s group returned to tipping in its dining rooms. He said the change followed a review of the policy’s practical and cultural effects during the pandemic.
• To improve fairness between front- and back-of-house employees, the company introduced a kitchen revenue-share program. Meyer identified restrictions on sharing tips across roles as a central issue and said he would support changing state rules to allow tips to be shared more broadly.

Reopening, takeout, and restaurant formats

• Meyer said four restaurants had reopened in the week before the summit, with indoor dining at 50% capacity alongside outdoor dining.
• He expected takeout and delivery to remain part of restaurant operations, but as an addition to—not a replacement for—the dine-in business.
• He suggested that outdoor dining and delivery could help restaurants use existing capacity and add revenue, including roughly 20% more through sidewalk dining and another 10% through courier orders, as he described it.
• He was skeptical that ghost kitchens represented a major near-term growth opportunity, arguing that many existing restaurants already had unused kitchen capacity and could support virtual brands themselves.
• He expected restaurant events, weddings, office food service, airports, train stations, and university dining to recover, with 2022 looking stronger for many event-related bookings.

Metrics cited for Union Square Hospitality Group

• The group had about 2,400 employees before the shutdown; Meyer said it reduced staffing to 150 in March 2020.
• The company created the HUGS Fund, a 501(c)(3), and raised $2 million to support team members.
• At the time of the summit, the group had about 450 employees and was rebuilding its workforce.
• Meyer said labor shortages had been a problem in the industry for roughly the five years before the pandemic.
• He described the pandemic as an opportunity to reopen with fewer competitors, access to talent, and potentially more favorable real-estate opportunities.

Key takeaways for hospitality leaders

• Treat trust as a commercial asset: make policies, prices, safety practices, and service standards understandable before the guest commits.
• Pair operational efficiency with human judgment; empower frontline employees to solve problems.
• Use a crisis to reassess fixed costs, compensation structures, hiring, and the guest experience—not just to restore pre-crisis operations.
• Measure hospitality through both guest outcomes and employee experience.
• Build products around changing behavior, including longer stays, remote work, outdoor service, takeout, and appointment-based amenities.
• Make diversity and inclusion operational: set goals, publish progress, and hold the organization accountable.
• Restore demand through demonstrated value and confidence rather than discounting alone.

Presenters and sources

• Peter Greenberg — keynote speaker; travel journalist and travel-industry commentator.
• Danny Meyer — Union Square Hospitality Group founder and recipient of the SHA Icon Award.
• Leora Lanz — SHA graduate-program chair and summit chair; moderated the discussions.
• Dean Upneja — introduced the keynote and Icon Award recipient and led portions of the Q&A.
• Boston University School of Hospitality Administration (SHA) — host of the 2021 Hospitality Leadership Summit.