The cost of a hotel room is up — a lot. Recently, prices have leapt nationwide at triple the rate of inflation. Even some business travelers are turning to peer-to-peer rentals to escape the prices.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

The cost of a hotel room is going up a lot. In big cities like Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, a regular room is nearly 40 percent more expensive than it was in 2011. From member station WSHU, Charles Lane explains why the economic downturn made room prices go up.

CHARLES LANE, BYLINE: This is another headache you can blame on the recession.

ALAN WEISSMAN: It was as if someone turned a valve off on the money.

LANE: Alan Weissman is a hotel developer, and he says you need money to build hotels. And back during the recession…

WEISSMAN: Literally, overnight, the credit market dried up. This is where you’ll come in. This will be the front door here.

LANE: Weissman is showing off his latest, a five-story Hilton in Westchester just north of New York City. Framers have the walls studded out, and Weissman hopes to get windows in before winter so they can have rooms ready by summer. And travelers will be glad to have them.

WEISSMAN: I think there was an absolute stop in new construction, so there’s kind of a back log.

LANE: The recession-induced lag in construction lasted until 2012. Once money started flowing again, developers raced to catch up. But it takes time to build a hotel. Today, some 132,000 hotel rooms are being built. Until they’re done, there simply aren’t enough beds to go around. And right now, demand is huge from business travelers. Coleen Clark is managing editor of Jet Setter, an online magazine and hotel booking site.

COLEEN CLARK: The economy’s good. People are traveling more. Gas prices have gone down, so it’s even cheaper to get around now. So people are on the road more.

LANE: It’s a double whammy – short supply and high demand with business travelers. But then there’s this third whammy – vacationers. Clark says social media is rewiring what people value in life.

CLARK: These amazing vacation shots of – people are taking all the time might be the one vacation they take every year. But when you look at a feed, you’re seeing these pictures every day. And so I think a lot of times, vacation’s just top of mind now.

LANE: The bottom line is sticker shock. In some cities, run of the mill hotel rooms are renting for $400 to $500 a night.

CLARK: And as demand has gone up, prices have gone up as well.

LANE: That can be tough on business travelers whose budgets are sometimes capped by company per diem policies.

MARC MCCABE: We say that business trips are the trips you have to take, not necessarily the ones that you want to take.

LANE: Marc McCabe runs the business travel division for Airbnb, the home-sharing website. When hotel rates first started going up, McCabe says travel managers for large companies reached out to him for ways to cut costs. Airbnb will soon add more features aimed at more comfortable business travel.

MCCABE: Airbnb has the opportunity, I think, to make business travelers feel a little bit more at home and to give a traveler who’s on, you know – in the same location for two or three weeks that extra space to cook some food, to wash their own clothes.

LANE: McCabe says the hotel shortage and the recession catapulted Airbnb to where they are now. The company plans to sell stock and says they’re worth $24 billion. Still, even McCabe says traditional hotels won’t be replaced. He sees peer-to-peer rentals more like a safety valve for when sporting events or conventions bring to town more heads than beds. For NPR News, I’m Charles Lane.

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

Ever since the Obama administration announced last week it had agreed to a massive trade deal, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, lawmakers have been saying they must review the agreement’s specific language before passing judgment.

“Without having read it … I’m going to reserve my time to read it,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told NPR when asked whether TPP would win support in Congress.

So, why don’t members of Congress just take a look at the TPP? If the administration has signed off on the trade agreement involving the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim countries, then where is the document?

For now, it is indisposed while getting cleaned up.

But it’s not taking a shower. Rather, the TPP is getting a “legal scrub.”

That’s the term used by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to describe the process that follows a handshake deal. Lawyers, translators and other staffers have to come up with the final, detailed language that ensures the deal is clear in each country.

That’s not easy. TPP includes Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam. So documents have to line up precisely in English, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay and more.

The deal was closed on Monday, and later in the week, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman told reporters that scrubbing all of the words in a document covering 30 chapters may take about a month.

Then, the TPP will be made available online. Congress will have at least 90 legislative days to review it. Both the House and Senate must approve implementing legislation for TPP to take effect.

For now, everyone can see overview material posted by the USTR office.

Deciding whether to approve the TPP will be difficult for many lawmakers. Most business groups strongly support it, but labor groups, environmentalists and others — including many Tea Partiers — are fiercely opposed.

As long as the “scrubbing” goes on, the lawmakers can keep their hands clean of the TPP. But at some point in 2016, they will be pushed to make a decision. Most analysts are predicting the vote will happen between Easter and Memorial Day.

Car ads don’t seem keen on aging consumers. NPR’s Scott Simon and national desk correspondent Ina Jaffe discuss exactly how ads are becoming Boomer-averse and why.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A recent magazine ad for Buick said, we engineered all the grandma out of it. NPR’s Ina Jaffe covers aging and noticed this ad seems to be part of a trend in car advertising. Ina, thanks so much for being with us.

INA JAFFE, BYLINE: Oh, my pleasure, Scott.

SIMON: And where’d you see the ad?

JAFFE: It was in last month’s issue of Bon Appetit magazine. For people who aren’t familiar, it’s a cooking magazine. Almost three quarters of the subscribers are women, and I’m one of them. But I wondered about this ad placement because I just bet a lot of Bon Appetit subscribers are grandmothers.

SIMON: Is it possibly just some advertising copywriter playing off the old it’s not your father’s Oldsmobile line?

JAFFE: Well, they’re definitely re-launching the Buick brand. But in this case, it wasn’t dad’s car. It was grandma’s. And I think I noticed it because of some other car commercials on TV that are using grandmas to make their point.

SIMON: I mean, I think of the three older women who are test-driving a Volkswagen.

JAFFE: Exactly, exactly. They’re known as the Golden Sisters. And they really are sisters, two in their 70s and one is over 80. In at least a couple of the Volkswagen spots, they appear to be sexually harassing much-younger men. There’s one with a blue jean-wearing guy bending over to inspect something on a car in the showroom. And he does not go unnoticed by the sisters.

(SOUNDBITE OF VOLKSWAGEN ADVERTISEMENT)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #1: You like the color? It’s silver fox.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #2: Terse, stop it right now. You’re both trying to pick him up.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #1: You are gorgeous.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: Thank you.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #3: Do you have junk in your trunk?

SIMON: Oh, my, now, some people would find that funny. Some people would find it offensive.

JAFFE: You know, you’re right, there are bunch of online comments and articles in the trades by people who think these commercials are hilarious, though one column I read thought the ads were so disrespectful, it called them elder abuse. But, you know, you also see the same kind of divide when it comes to a campaign for a BMW SUV. They’re touting the cars three tiers of seats. Mom and dad are sitting in front, brother and sister in the second row. And way in the back with her little face just visible above the seat in front of her is grandma.

(SOUNDBITE OF BMW ADVERTISEMENT)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #3: Make a left at the drug store.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: Thanks, mom. It’s all right here on the head-up display.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #3: My mom used to yell heads up when she spotted a twister coming across the plains. (Shouting) Heads up.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: OK, that’s loud, mom.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #3: That’s how we did it on the plains. We’re plains people.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: You’re from Queens, mom.

JAFFE: And I should mention that grandma’s son, the dad, looks so pained during these exchanges.

SIMON: So is this sexist? Is it ageist, a little of both, or just demeaning?

JAFFE: Well, one of the people I call when I have those questions is Ashton Applewhite. She writes about aging on a blog called This Chair Rocks. And those BMW spots – don’t get her started.

ASHTON APPLEWHITE: I mean, what do we put in the way back of our cars? Groceries, maybe the golden retriever. You know, also, she’s annoying. She’s sort of generally clueless. And those are cliches that we just accept about older people because it hasn’t gone challenged.

JAFFE: And she says the women in the VW commercials are also annoying and clueless. But she gives the ads props for at least acknowledging that the three sisters are sexual beings, which is rare in portrayals of older people.

SIMON: But do you reach women of a certain age by defaming grandmothers?

JAFFE: Well, the head of the Buick brand, Duncan Aldred, told Automotive News that they’re consciously attacking the image of Buick as an old-person’s brand. But you know Scott, maybe he’s on to something. Everyone knows that boomers don’t ever want to get old, right? So maybe even older women don’t want a car that says grandma.

SIMON: NPR’s Ina Jaffe, thanks so much.

JAFFE: Oh, my pleasure.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

Volkswagen faces two enormous repair jobs: fixing its polluting diesel cars and its battered reputation. Both may be much harder to fix than anything other scandal-plagued car companies have faced.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Volkswagen now faces two enormously difficult repair jobs. First, fixing millions of polluting VW diesel vehicles, and second, fixing Volkswagen’s reputation after the company was found cheating on emissions tests. Car companies have patched their battered brands before, but, as NPR’s Sonari Glinton reports, the scandal at Volkswagen is different.

SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Some practices on Capitol Hill get repeated so often, they become rituals. Every year or so a car CEO gets taken to the woodshed by Congress. It’s kind of like an annual rite – the shaming of the car executives.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: I don’t see here in GM they’re just whistleblowers.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: You would also be insane if the top executives from the three automakers came here on private jets.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: You just can’t say now, now, and forget the past because people died.

GLINTON: Those were from car hearings past – General Motors’ ignition switch, the auto bailout, Takata air bags, et cetera. And I don’t have to play you a montage to give you a sense of how Congress feels about Volkswagen this week – this bit of tape from Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky does the trick.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JAN SCHAKOWSKY: The company’s word isn’t worth a dime. The only thing I want to hear today is exactly how will Volkswagen make this right by consumers.

REBECCA LINDLAND: It’s just another black mark against an industry that, to some extent, people love to hate.

GLINTON: Rebecca Lindland is senior auto analyst with KBB.com. She says the backlash against Volkswagen is different. Beyond the inherent deception, Lindland says the cheat feels personal to people in the U.S. who specifically sought out VW, especially Gen Xers, who are most loyal to the brand.

GLINTON: We went out on a limb. You know, we didn’t go with the obvious choices of a Chevrolet or a Honda. We went with a Volkswagen, and that’s a statement.

GLINTON: Lindland says fixing that relationship will take years, and so will fixing the actual cars.

LINDLAND: The reason that the fix is going to take so long over time is that there’s a number of different generations that are involved and there’s a number of different fixes. So not all vehicles can be fixed through a software upgrade.

GLINTON: Lindland and others say as bad as it may seem for Volkswagen, the company could actually improve its relationship with customers by handling the fix quickly and well. Jack Fitzgerald has been a car dealer since 1966, and he’s had two VW dealerships since the ’90s. He says when it comes to the VW fix, speed matters.

JACK FITZGERALD: Well, the most important thing they can do is to get the matter resolved quickly, get whatever the fix is going to be, and get it installed. And the sooner they do that the sooner the interest in the media will calm down.

GLINTON: Fitzgerald says the anger people feel about Volkswagen is anger he’s felt many times before about other big car companies.

FITZGERALD: Is it cheating to knowingly put out a car with a defective emissions switch that you could fix for a buck or less? How about air bags that you were told by your own employees, it’s going to blow up. But you do it anyway. Isn’t that cheating?

GLINTON: Fitzgerald says customers have a right to be angry, but he’s not surprised.

FITZGERALD: These manufacturers do so many things like this so I suspect that we will periodically run into things like this forever.

GLINTON: Fitzgerald says the real fix would be if consumers paid more attention to recalls, and regulators found the problems and caught the cheaters sooner. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.