Hotel performance in the United Kingdom across December showed no real improvement from previous months as the country remained subject to tight restrictions.
The government did not relax restrictions over the Christmas holiday, and officials imposed a full lockdown immediately thereafter, STR director Thomas Emanuel said in his monthly video overview of U.K. hotel performance. STR is a division of CoStar, which publishes Hotel News Now.
The U.K. has had a good start in its vaccine rollout, which is something hoteliers can be excited about, he said. Government statistics show that 6.35 million first doses were administered as of Jan. 23.
Emanuel said hotel occupancy declined throughout the month as the government announced new restrictions, which had a possible impact on New Year’s Eve. For the holiday, U.K. hotel occupancy stood at 14%.
Decreases in occupancy resulted in the greatest year-over-year fluctuations in average daily rate decreases since June — between 44% and 30% declines. Revenue per available room was negatively affected and declined year over year between 60% on Dec. 12-13 and “a full 91% on the 29th of the month,” Emanuel said.
“Sadly these numbers are not surprising,” he said, “but they remain very sobering indeed and really did put into stark reality the position the industry is currently in.”
He said there was not a correlation between the performance of individual U.K. cities and the one of four COVID-19 tiers they were in before the full lockdown went into effect at the end of the month.
“Lockdown is the great leveler,” he added, with London performance roughly the same as regional U.K. performance, even though for most of 2020 rural and seaside destinations did markedly better than the capital and the country’s other large cities.
But lower-class segments of hotels enjoyed the highest occupancies.
Emanuel added that the U.K.’s performance was not the worst in Europe, with very tight restrictions across the continent roughly similar in nature.
For instance, Austria hotels reported occupancy of 10% in December, while Germany and Poland hotel occupancy was 12%.
“None of us will look back to 2020 with any joy,” Emanuel said.
Full-year 2020 occupancy in the U.K. stood at 40%, he said, which includes January, February and part of March when the world did not fully comprehend the severity of the virus.
Emanuel said January 2021 does not look hopeful either, with full lockdown measures limiting occupancy in Belfast to only 8% and London to only 19% as of the week of Jan. 4-10. The best-performing markets in terms of hotel occupancy for that week were Aberdeen at 35% and Plymouth at 30%.
For more of Emanuel’s insights into U.K. performance data, and especially the new methodology of “economic occupancy,” watch the video above.
Editor’s note: The video included in this article was filmed by Thomas Emanuel, director at STR, on Jan. 21 and edited and produced by CoStar Group. HNN is a division of STR, a CoStar Group company.