| 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. |
- Bankruptcies
- Branding and marketing disputes
- Business interruption
- Business practices
- Damages claims evaluations
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Securities litigation
- Valuations
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Chekitan S. Dev
Singapore Tourism Distinguished Professor,
Professor of Marketing,
Professor of Management,
SC Johnson College of Business, School of Hotel Administration,
Cornell University
Our extensive network includes top experts from academia and industry.
Chekitan Dev is an internationally renowned authority on marketing and branding in the hospitality, travel, and tourism industries. As an expert witness, he has testified in deposition, trial, and at arbitration in numerous hospitality-related matters, in the United States and internationally, including multiple cases involving hotel owner–brand relationships and the online travel industry.
Professor Dev has consulted on marketing and branding to major corporations. He has more than forty years of experience analyzing an array of issues involving hotels, travel, and tourism. His recent research has focused on how branding and rebranding affect both public perception and profitability in the hospitality industry. In particular, he has assessed key drivers of profitability and customer loyalty, including branding, digital marketing, and consumer service. Professor Dev has also evaluated brand portfolio strategy in the context of hotel mergers.
An award-winning author, Professor Dev wrote Hospitality Branding (Cornell University Press), as well as over one hundred articles in leading academic and practitioner journals, including the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, and Harvard Business Review. He has coauthored multiple case studies for Harvard Business School, and in 2019 received the overall winner award for best case study from the Case Centre at the Cranfield School of Management (UK). The American Marketing Association recognized Professor Dev and his coauthors as finalists for the Best Service Research Paper of the Year Award for their article “Return on Service Amenities” (Journal of Marketing Research, 2017).
Professor Dev is a sought-after commentator on hospitality trends. He has been interviewed numerous times in the mainstream media, and his research featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Economist, and the International Herald Tribune, among others. The Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) has selected Professor Dev as one of the “Top 25 Most Extraordinary Minds in Hospitality, Travel and Tourism Sales and Marketing.”
At Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, Professor Dev teaches courses on brand and marketing management.
Hospitality, Travel, and Tourism Capabilities
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
How can we help you?
For more information or assistance with a specific matter, please contact us.