It may be me, I could wrong, but I tire of reading about what was once "high class" resorts in the tony foothills of Tucson, Arizona no up for sale, missing their mortgage payments, in foreclosure or, facing bankruptcy.
Back in the days before " the flood," here in America, when one chose the hospitality field for a career, especially in management, it was considered a classy career move.
It is my opinion that something bad happened: the industry began to make a lot of money - tons of it. I was in marketing management at the time. It was EASY. Long story short - everybody got greedy. Hotel management was never very good, over zealous accounts at best, really. And, everyone in marketing knows what an accountant's wild night out is - a third glass of wine.
Anyway, the tide of the industry turned slowly, but definitely away from a "calling" of Hostelry, that of being a vocation - Innkeeper, to just being an investment. That's all, you just bought something at a low price, then sold it at a higher price and pocketed the difference, or re-invested it into something else.
These land-sharks got so slick, the fins in the water got so fast, they would just announce they were breaking ground for a hotel and someone would offer to buy the land, a developer, maybe, and they would sell out at sometimes a 50% profit before they even turned a spade of dirt. Frenzy.
The dot-com bubble in early 2002 blew that out the window. That hit the crapper and it hasn't been nose up since. The spiral has been downward since, tourism has never recovered, sales departments are ghost towns, and with this stupid economy it's any one's guess if it ever gets better.
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