Every year, managers in charge of revenues from hotel properties and company headquarters gather in Nashville in balmy August to take a deep dive into hotel data and trends and ready themselves for budget season.
The Hotel Data Conference, or HDC — also referred to as “Powerpointpalooza” — is a day-and-a-half-long marathon of data presentation and industry panels examining all aspects of the hotel revenue cycle. This year’s sellout crowd immersed themselves in topics from group demand to top 25 market performance, midweek occupancy, and, of course, the newly revised forecast from STR, a Costar Group company.
The good news is that after being cut substantially between January and June, the forecast was only tweaked around the edges and still calls for 2% growth in hotel revenue per available room, or RevPAR. This is driven by the average daily rate, or ADR, growth, implying that supply and demand growth is in equilibrium and hotel occupancy stays at the level from a year ago.
The current industry buzzwords invoked on the HDC stages included “bifurcation,” “normalization,” “pivotal,” and “experience,” and point at what drives U.S. hotel performance so far this year. Higher-end hotels, often capitalizing on group demand, are doing well and are recording higher peak-night demand, according to Vail Ross from Simpleview. It was interesting to learn that the small and medium-sized markets her company tracks seemed to have outpaced 2019 group booking results while larger markets are still recovering compared to pre-pandemic levels.
What makes HDC so different from some of the other hotel conferences I attend is that other conferences' sessions are often sparsely attended, while the hallways are packed with deal makers and impromptu meetings. There is nothing wrong with that, but HDC is different; when sessions start, the hallways clear. The learning that is going on in the data sessions and panels is then solidified over lunch or dinner with like-minded revenue managers.
STR Vice President of Analytics Isaac Collazo and I recorded our podcast “Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast” live in front of the audience, which was quite a different experience than just looking at a Zoom screen. This new segment was a substitute for the old HDC Staple “Wine Down with the Bosses,” and maybe a little libation would not have hurt, given what we covered. Isaac pointed out that the preliminary July data came in much weaker than expected. RevPAR growth is expected to clock in at 0.1% — call that “flat” — from a year ago. And it looks like economy class hotels saw a 3% RevPAR decline. Then again, preliminary group ADR for higher-end hotels was up 4.2%. These numbers and the many varied data sets presented throughout the day were fodder for plenty of conversations at the following cocktail party.
It is not a stretch to assume that next year’s HDC — in August 2025 at the Grand Hyatt Nashville — will likely sell out even faster than this year. By that point, we will have an inauguration and another summer season behind us. This will give the STR team plenty of material to craft the next conference. The wait list for this year’s event was over 200 people long, so for next year, remember the old adage: “Book early, book often.”
Jan Freitag is the national director for hospitality market analytics at CoStar.
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