As we discussed in our earnings preview yesterday, hotel manager Marriott International (NYSE: MAR) reported its second quarter numbers this morning, and as we expected, we were given some more troublesome news from the company.

First the good news. While analysts had been expecting to see the company show earnings of 49 cents a share, the company was actually able to come in higher, with 51 cents per share. However, despite showing 2 cents better than expected, this still represents an 11% drop in earnings from continuing operations.

With so much uncertainty around the company going into this morning's earnings report, you may assume that beating its number by 2 cents would have the stock moving higher in premarket trading. Well, you would be wrong. The stock is actually trading down a little more than 6% following the news.

Why? A couple of factors, but mostly future forecasts.

Looking ahead the company offered lower- than-expected forecasts for both its third quarter as well as full year 2008 numbers. For the third quarter, Marriott is now expecting earning of 30 to 35 cents per share. This is well below the 41 cents analysts had expected The company offered 2008 guidance of $1.77 to $1.88, which also fell below analysts' estimates, which were about $1.91.

Last night in our earnings preview, we mentioned that analysts were going to be interested to see revenue per available room (revpar). Last month the company warned that revpar in America would probably drop to around 2%, down from its previous estimates of 3 to 5%. What we actually see, is that in the quarter revpar in America was even lower, with a reported 1.4%. Worldwide however, the numbers were a bit more encouraging, with a total worldwide revpar of 5.6% as the company reported that they are seeing high demand internationally... just not within the U.S.

As the housing market continues to have ripple effects into the hotel industry, things are definitely going to remain uncertain, but for sure the bad times are still appearing to be far from behind us. According to Marriott, "While there is much uncertainty, we expect weak economic growth and soft U.S. lodging demand to persist into 2009." I think that just about sums it up, and look for Wall Street to react hard today and drive the stock much lower in response.

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor's Observer.