Christopher J. Nassetta
President and Chief Executive Officer at Hilton Worldwide
Carlo, thanks for the question. That obviously is the prime question I think on everybody's mind. And I think it would be sort of best to start by saying as everybody on this call knows that there is certainly a lot of uncertainty in the world and I think we have to sort of be mindful of that as everybody has. I mean, we have been as much as we see what's going on and we're watching the broader environment and lots of talk of slowdown and seeing it in certain industries certainly, I think predominantly industries that had reached high watermarks that were -- had favorable impacts from COVID, but nonetheless starting to see slow down.
We have been looking very carefully at our business as you would guess at all the segments that sort of any forward-looking trends that we can see. And I would say you know what we are seeing still is very positive we see, as Kevin and I both said in our prepared comments, continued strength in leisure, we expect to see that continue into the fall at higher rates than normal. I mean, lower rates than summer like always, but higher rates than you would have typically seen pre-COVID just because of increased leisure business, business transient continues to recover led by recovery in the big corporates, which are not back to where they are, but they're back to sort of 80% of where they were and the SMB side of the business that has been quite robust. I mean, in the second half of the year based on the trends we've been seeing our expectation is business transient is going to be sort of on a revenue basis equal to 2019 levels.
And then, when we think about the group side, while we don't think in the second half, we'll get all the way back to where we were in '19. We're going to get awfully close and as I said in my prepared comments, if we look at the booking position in third and fourth quarter second half of the year, it's over 19 levels and our sales teams tell -- keep telling me they can hardly keep up with the demand.
Now reality is again, we're in an uncertain world, the booking windows are short. So, our visibility is limited certainly on transient business. We can't really look too deeply into the fall and transient. Again, we can on the group side and those stats are good, but the current trajectory is good. Looking at July, June as we said was over 19 levels. July is trending in a very good way and it will be over '19 and improve over and above what we saw in June. So, we -- everything we're seeing sort of real-time, everything we have in terms of sight lines into the future, all feel pretty good, recognizing it's an -- there's a lot of macro uncertainty and recognizing that our booking windows and sight lines are not that far out.
I think what is causing it like sort of as you see other industries sort of being impacted every day, including today is a big reporting day. Again, I think a lot of what you see coming sort of going the wrong way, our industries that were at crazy peak because they were huge beneficiaries, many of them of COVID and the pandemic. We were obviously not a big beneficiary. I think that's a fairly nice way of putting it and our industry got hammered. And so what we are benefiting from, I think, is sort of a handful of things, one, there is a lot of pent-up demand. we hear it all the time. I mean, while I don't have tremendous sight lines in the sense of real transient booking data to give you because it doesn't exist. We talk to our customers all the time, not just the group customers we're talking to all of our customers and we're in a regular dialog with our SMBs, with the big corporates and the anecdotal feedback that we're getting, as we go into the fall is people have to travel more, more offices are open, more people are back in the office. While people are worried about where the macro environment is going, they've got to run the businesses. And in fact, the more worried they are, the more they realize they sort of got to get out there and make sure they're hustling.
So there is an element of pent-up demand, there is clearly, and I'm not going to say I was right, but I've been right there's clearly a massive shift in spending patterns, away from goods into service. I said in my prepared comments, I've been saying since the beginning of the pandemic that the world is not going to go upside down that it may go upside down for a while, but it will normalize and that's exactly what we're seeing. And so not only do we have pent-up demand, we just have new demand that's coming as people are sort of shifting their spending patterns that means, leisure business group that people are shifting back to a more normalized lifestyle, maybe it's not exactly the way it was, but it's more like it was then it was -- it's more like it was pre-COVID then it is during COVID.
And so we're the beneficiary of that. You have infrastructure like people don't talk about it, we passed nearly trillion dollar infrastructure package last year, very little of that has been spent. Traditionally, you would start to see spending in the second, third and fourth year. So we're just sort of coming into the zone over the next two or three years on $1 trillion of spending. I've said this so many times you guys are tired of hearing it the highest r-squared correlation to demand growth in hotel rooms is in RFI non-residential fixed investment AKA infrastructure.
So I think -- we think, we feel good about sort of that being sort of a underpinning broadly Asia recovery, Kevin talked about it. Asia has been way behind. It's not recovering as quickly as we would have thought, particularly China, but I do -- but it is recovering and I think that provides some benefit not just the rest of this year but into next year. And then probably last but not least, if we look at our customers certainly like our Honors base, which are driving the disproportionate share of our system-wide revenues. At the moment, they're still in pretty good shape. I mean, the median income of our higher end Honors members is significantly over $100,000 median income. And so at the moment, they're still in pretty good shape and we haven't really yet seen any real cracks in the armor in terms of their spending pattern.
So I know that filibuster of sorts, but I think it gives -- to answer the question it gives you color as we sat in the very room we're sitting in and thought about how do we feel about the rest of this year. That's how we sort of tell, we came up with our forecast and our outlook. And as we think about next year, listen, I would be silly to say I know because nobody knows this that we're in pretty much unchartered water so as the smartest economist I talk to are saying the same thing. So gotta know. But I think a bunch of those things that I described are pretty good wind in our sails against what is obviously going to be a slowing U.S. and global economy because that's what central banks are going to do. But we have some things that I think sort of our winds blowing the other way. And so I think as we get into the first half of next year, we're feeling like that is going to be helpful to us, how we think the whole year will play out obviously it's premature for us to judge. And when we get a bit closer to it, we'll will have a little bit more precise view.
