Hospitality, Travel, and Tourism

Cornerstone Research provides a customized approach to issues arising in these industries, as well as cross-disciplinary expertise in finance, competition, marketing, and real estate.

We support counsel for international resorts, hotels and hotel chains, airlines, online travel agents, cruise lines, and sports organizations on a wide range of matters. The hospitality, travel, and tourism industries face significant near and long-term complex challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. We address these and a range of other matters.

Hospitality, Travel, and Tourism Capabilities

Resorts, Hotels, and Hotel Chains

  • Loss of financing: Determining the impact of loss of financing, including analyses of alleged delays in construction; the effects of macroeconomic and company-specific factors on financial performance; actual versus projected occupancy rates; and damages.
  • Metrics analyses: Evaluating occupancy, room rates, revenues per room, and other metrics in the context of material adverse change (MAC) clauses.
  • Economic fairness: Analyzing the fairness of economic terms and adequacy of consideration in a multibillion-dollar transaction involving a private equity firm’s purchase of a hotel company.
  • Branding: Determining the brand impact of a proposed hotel property on a similar nearby property.

Online Travel Agencies

  • Commonality of consumer usage: Evaluating some of the world’s largest online travel agencies (OTAs), for example, to address allegations that an agency offered rooms at unavailable hotels in order to steer consumers to other properties.
  • Business practices: Analyzing multiple OTA business models and their global distribution systems (GDS).

Construction

  • Performing detailed analyses in a variety of matters, including analyzing how alleged construction defects have affected the business performance of real estate projects such as hotels, casinos, and mixed-use developments.

Sports Organizations

  • Profitability: Assessing stadium profitability by projecting attendance and calculating resulting ticket revenues, concessions and apparel revenues, and costs.
  • Market research: Conducting market research (including geography, event types, and typical customer profile) for a major sports and entertainment venue.