Skift Take

In Skift’s top stories this week, travel agents describe their changed roles, the highest-paid hotel CEOs are revealed, and Vancouver Island Tourism adopts a new tourism model.

Sonia Menken

Throughout the week we are posting original stories night and day covering news and travel trends, including on the impact of coronavirus. Every weekend we will offer you a chance to read the most essential stories again in case you missed them earlier.

The Re-Reinvention of the Travel Agent: Travel agents, sometimes called advisors, have seen many changes through the years, but the pandemic altered their profession in unimaginable ways. And that upheaval’s not dying down anytime soon, with booking travel becoming more complicated and advisors seeing their roles as even more necessary.

The Highest Paid Hotel CEOs: Take a look at last year’s hotel CEO compensation tables. The top bosses did well, and why not? Navigating the pandemic was tricky. Yet there was a wide disparity in the pay between most CEOs and workers. That’s harder to defend.

Early Lessons From Vancouver Island Tourism’s Shift From Marketer to Social Enterprise: Swapping its marketing role to focus on social impact is as inspiring as it gets coming out of a destination’s tourism board. But Vancouver Island’s 4VI will need to communicate at a whole new level of transparency — staying mindful of priorities that its resident communities may consider most important.

Marriott Vacations to Get New CEO as Timeshare Sector Faces High Hurdles: You may not personally want to buy a timeshare. But the sales pitch for the timeshare business can still reveal valuable intel about broader trends, such as cross-marketing tactics and the rise of subscription clubs.

7 Takeaways From Online Travel Agencies Slugging It Out on Mobile: Once dismissed as a commission-free loss leader, flights are a new battleground as Expedia and Hopper compete over keywords and customers on mobile.

Why Qatar Airways Is Preparing for ‘Pain’ During World Cup in Its Country: Qatar Airways will cut flying, and may lose money, during the World Cup in Doha later this year. But that may not matter as the country seeks to boost its brand with the event.

Business Travel Surge Playing Key Role in Event Tech Bubble Burst — For Now: Virtual events don’t seem to be cutting it anymore in the emerging, post-pandemic world, but business travelers should think twice before throwing away their headsets.

Tourist Quotas Come To French Countryside to Combat Overtourism: National park and rural authorities in France have absorbed lessons from domestic overtourism during the pandemic.

Why Tour Operators Are Emerging as Travel’s Most Vocal Leaders for Sustainability: The global focus on sustainability will be the catalyst for the asset light and human-focused tour operator sector going mainstream.

Rising Interest Rates Are Scrambling Hotel Deal Calculations: Baron Ah Moo works for PKF Hospitality and is a former hotel CEO. So he’s well-connected among private equity firms and other dealmakers. Here’s what they’re telling him now.

Skift Take

Carleton Varney leaves behind a legacy that gave hotel operators the freedom to break from bland playbooks on design, and that challenged them — Dare to be bold.

Tom Lowry

Carleton Varney, a renowned interior decorator whose love of audacious colors defied convention in the all-too-often cookie cutter world of hotel interiors, died earlier this month in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was 85, and his death came after a long illness.

He worked not only in revamping such landmark hotels as The Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the Grand Hotel on Michigan’s Mackinac Island and The Breakers in Palm Beach, Florida, but he also lent his flair for color to cruise ships and homes across the globe. His work extended to the estates of the ultra wealthy and the White House. His star clients included Jimmy Carter, Joan Crawford, Fay Wray, Joe Namath, Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, among many others.

Varney learned his design aesthetic starting first as a draftsman, and then working closely with design doyenne Dorothy Draper before heading her company, Dorothy Draper & Company, as owner and president for nearly six decades. He bought the company after her death in 1969.

Both Varney and Draper were known for their use of colors as rich as emerald green, melon orange, and azalea pink.

Varney’s work included designs for “the Westbury Hotels in London, Dromoland Castle, Sheraton Waikiki, Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth II, The Plaza and the Waldorf Towers. His design talent was also put to use in the Charlotte Motor Speedway Clubhouse, the Cleveland Browns uniforms and the USS Sequoia, which is better known as the presidential yacht,” according to an obituary in WWD.

“Most people don’t understand that the visual is everything — the doorknobs, the hardware — I see everything. Rooms talk to me,” Varney once told WWD. “People become more conservative as they get older. They lose the freedom of being a child in the paintbox. They need confirmation and they want to be part of the group.”

Varney’s also owned textile and wallcovering company Carleton V Ltd. He was seen on the “Live Vividly” show on the Home Shopping Network and penned dozens of books, including “There’s No Place Like Home: Confessions of an Interior Designer,” “In the Pink: Dorothy Draper, America’s Most Fabulous Decorator,” and “Houses in My Heart: An International Decorator’s Colorful Journey.”

Never one to shy away from telling it straight, Varney loved to share his travel experiences and offer bold critiques.

“I once went to a hotel on my way back from Bora Bora, and the carpet was a knobby gray, and the walls were beige with white trim, and the curtains were gray-beige,” Mr. Varney told The Washington Post in 2020. “Even the art was beige. I went into the travertine bathroom, and when I came out, I thought I was naked in a bowl of oatmeal.”