Group trade is back, temporary demand for business is driving up average daily hotel rates, and American cities are enjoying their comeback.
On a recent episode of “Tell Me More: The Hospitality Data Podcast,” Costar’s national director of hospitality analytics, Jan Freitag, and SRR’s vice president of analytics, Isaac Collazo, enjoyed the traditional high-performance period of the U.S. hotel industry calendar.
“We’re seeing very good housing and ADR growth, especially since September,” Collazo said. “We’re getting more traditional business travelers and more meeting travelers.”
Freitag added that group nights sold in September were down slightly this year from September 2019. This reinforces the idea of a more formal US hotel trend line, where occupancy typically peaks before Halloween, then starts to dip towards the end. The year.
“Isaac and I have a little side bet: Will we sell more team rooms in October than we did in 2019?” Freitag joked. “Do you have the best team months ever? So stay tuned for that.”
Why cities have benefited from a strong team and trade-through demand in recent months.
“It has a lot to do with the business,” Collazo said, citing CoStar data showing that luxury, upscale, upscale and mid-range hotel chains sold more rooms this year than in the second or third quarter of 2019. .
He called the chain’s top and middle tiers the “real bedrock of small and medium-sized businesses.”
As of November 2021, the upper midscale is selling more units than in 2019 and is essentially higher. [has] From March 2022,” he said.
But Freitag cautioned that even though many cities saw strong revenue growth on a per-segment basis, those numbers aren’t necessarily back to 2019 levels.
“Boston’s September RevPAR was 7.7% and in Washington, D.C., RevPAR reached 15%, but that doesn’t mean we’re back in 2019,” he said. “It’s just year after year.”
Under the title The Recession in the US, Freytag and Collazo continue the head-versus-heart debate.
The STR forecast still predicts a recession “because it’s smart to do that,” Collazo said, “in my heart, I just don’t see it.”
His personal view is that the hotel industry will not be affected even in a technical downturn, especially in his professional field, as his career continues to grow.
STR’s upcoming forecast includes a “slight revision,” Collazo said, to a better-than-expected third-quarter performance.
Freytag pushed it back a bit, arguing that a prolonged high-interest-rate environment is creating the possibility of a recession in the absence of credit.
“It is very, very difficult to do anything, because it is very expensive to borrow anything.” “And I think corporations are going to start cutting costs, and that has implications upstream and downstream.”
In this episode, the pair also discuss:
- What impact might Choice Hotels International’s acquisition of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts have on the economy and the mid-range chain’s balance sheets?
- Theories explaining why the equilibrium of the economic chain is delayed.
- Early indicators of holiday demand in the US
In this section, we also mention Part 3: Let AI be your co-pilot.
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