Hotels, airlines and related businesses have benefited as consumers shift their spending away from goods and toward experiences, giving those companies room to raise prices.
“We’re not seeing any signs that fundamentals are weakening,” Christopher J. Nassetta, the chief executive at Hilton Worldwide, said on its earnings call with investors. He noted that “rising demand coupled with historically low industry supply growth should continue to drive strong pricing power.”
Wyndham Hotels reported that the typical demand drop-off in autumn is less pronounced than usual. Uber said that October was set to be its best month ever for ride bookings, thanks in part to the “continued shift of consumer spending from retail back to services,” the company’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, said on Tuesday.
At JetBlue, “we’re not seeing any cracks in underlying demand,” Joanna Geraghty, the airline’s chief operating officer, said when describing how it was recovering its earnings after the hit from the pandemic.
Some firms are raising prices to protect their profit margins, and because they can.
PepsiCo raised its sales and profit forecasts for the year, in large part because of consumers’ willingness to pay more for soda and snacks. “One of our goals clearly is to both gain share and to grow margins. And frankly, that’s something that I think we can do,” Hugh F. Johnston, PepsiCo’s chief financial officer, told analysts.
At Colgate-Palmolive, “we felt it was very important to get ahead of the inflationary environment and take as much pricing as we could,” said Noel R. Wallace, the consumer product maker’s chief executive. The company raised prices in North America by 9 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, up from a 3 percent bump in the second quarter.
Chipotle Mexican Grill has seen “minimal resistance” to price increases, Brian Niccol, the restaurant chain’s chief executive, told investors. In the third quarter, Chipotle increased prices 13 percent from a year earlier, and it expects prices to be up 15 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter.
