News headlines may still forecast a lot of doom and gloom, but keep your eye on the numbers, say the hosts of the Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast in their latest episode.
"We're all so focused on sentiment, that everything is going down, going south," said Isaac Collazo, STR's senior director of analytics. "But a year ago, revenue per available room year to date was only up 0.5% and right now it's up 1.6%."
U.S. hotels in April did not suffer as much from the Easter holiday calendar shift as Collazo predicted they might, which was a positive.
And while average daily rate in April showed 1.8% growth — the highest since January — it's still below the rate of inflation.
Collazo and co-host Jan Freitag, CoStar's national director of hospitality analytics, reminded listeners on this episode how important calendar shifts really are to hotel performance. Big events that boost hotel performance one year — like 2024's solar eclipse, what month a shifting holiday falls in or even when schools schedule spring break — often make the following year's performance by comparison look devastating.
But remembering the impact of calendar shifts "makes a lot of people feel a lot better about underlying performance, because we can explain away a lot of that demand shift," Freitag said.
The pair also talked about rebound in the top 25 U.S. hotel markets, which collectively saw 2.1% RevPAR gains and 3.5% ADR gains in April.
San Francisco led the way, where trade shows helped the city grow RevPAR in the month by 37.4% over last April. Tampa, Miami, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago also had RevPAR gains over 6%.
Gains, however, are not the word when it comes to the U.S. hotel pipeline, Freitag said. He pointed out that over the last four months, the number of hotel rooms in construction has declined, following a period of more than three years of low-but-steady numbers.
"Over the last three years, through the gyrations of what higher construction costs do to owners, developers seem to have found a way to get financing and conviction and say, 'Yep, we're going to break ground,'" Freitag said. "Now, suddenly, yes hotels are opening but there aren't as many breaking ground."
Also in this episode
- A deep dive into demand,
- Inbound and outbound travel data,
- How the pipeline breaks out by chain scale,
- The latest hotel conversions data,
- Freitag shares his Bundesliga pride for hometown team Arminia Bielefeld, which played in last weekend's Bundesliga Pokalfinale,
- and more.