The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris was an enormous success, both for its sporting action and its hotel performance.
Tom Emanuel, senior director of STR, CoStar’s hotel analytics division, said the Paris 2024 Olympics provide a slew of gold-medal hotel-performance data, with its hoteliers fully trained and showing every discipline to satisfy the Olympic motto of “Citius, Altius, Fortius," or “faster, higher, stronger.”
Speaking on the first episode of Hotel News Now's newest podcast, "The Upgrade: EMEA Hospitality News," Emanuel said that over the 16 days of the games, when compared year over year, occupancy in Paris was up 25%, and average daily rate was up 141%.
“In terms of market performance, I would say [the games were] more magnifique than terrible,” he said.
Emanuel said the lowest year-on-year RevPAR data point on any day across any chain scale was 75% growth, and the highest was 311%, an outstanding level, even if perhaps the French in a normal year abandon Paris in August for the coasts and countryside.
Parisian hotels revenue-managed these games very well indeed, he said, especially in an environment with no new hotel supply at all.
"Before a mega-event, you would expect to see a lot of new rooms open… but that wasn't the case in Paris. We've seen flat supply in Paris now for several years, and that obviously has been good news for those existing hoteliers," he said.
Emanuel contrasted Paris' "unusual" near-zero supply growth ahead of the Olympics with how other markets added supply, like Beijing ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics and Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup
"It's a nod to Paris that the city can host an event like the Olympics, and its existing hotel inventory can cope," he said.
London, the host city for the 2012 Summer Olympics and perhaps the best comparable in terms of size, according to Emanuel, saw 2% hotel supply growth in 2011 and 5% growth in 2012, concentrated largely around very event-specific neighborhoods.
Luxury hotel average daily rate hit its high point on opening ceremony night in Paris, reaching €2,022 and notching rates above €1,700 every night of the Games.
For more from Hotel News Now's interview with Tom Emanuel and his excitement at watching superstar swimmer Léon Marchand and and judoka Teddy Riner each win gold, listen to the podcast above. Subscribe to the Hotel News Now podcast wherever you like to listen.
Read more news on Hotel News Now.