As the hospitality and travel industry continues to recover, and with group and business sectors still trailing behind, predicting transient travel demand patterns becomes more critical than ever. With spring break soon to get into full swing, school calendars will dramatically affect travel availability for students and their families through the end of April 2022.
There are roughly 51 million kindergarten to 12th grade public school students across the U.S., and observing academic schedules can help predict the impact on hotel occupancy compared to previous years, whether we prefer to compare this year to 2020 or a baseline back to “normal” life in 2019.
According to the School Break Report from CoStar hospitality analytics firm STR, the percentage of public school district students on spring break will peak highest in 2022 on Easter Weekend (April 16-17), with 45% of all U.S. K-12 students available to travel. As is often the case, many school districts around the country will plan a break — consisting of at least four or more consecutive days out of session — around Easter. There will be a similar earlier peak on the weekend of March 20-21 as well. Dates corresponding to Mondays in 2022 are marked on the chart below, as well as the other charts that follow:
It’s worth noting, however, that the spike in school calendar breaks is often muted in years with a later Easter holiday compared to years when Easter lands in March or early April. Many school districts seem to want to plan spring break — typically a full week — around mid- or late March to help break up the spring semester as equitably as possible. When Easter lands in March — or even the first weekend of April — it creates a perfect storm of school districts nationwide rallying around a single weekend for their vacation scheduling, leading to higher peaks in travel than in a typical year with a mid-April Easter holiday.
In fact, we only need to look back at 2021 to see the difference that an earlier Easter can make:
Note that the difference between students on break during spring of 2022 and 2021 is shown in percentage points in the graphic above, simply to help illustrate the swing that can be expected in national travel demand this year compared to last.
In 2021, spring break peaked with nearly 65% of students on break during the first weekend in April, corresponding with Easter last year, and accounting for more than 30 million students across the country on break simultaneously.
Certainly, there have been a lot of other factors in play that will affect U.S. travel demand this year, but the shifts in nationwide student travel availability cannot be ignored when comparing, for example, the level of hotel occupancy that should be expected for the first weekend of April 2022 compared to 2021. Likewise, there’s a very real chance that travel demand will be considerably higher for the weekends in mid-April this year than it was in 2021.
Due to the effect of the pandemic on travel demand for the past two years, many hoteliers and analysts are still using 2019 as a baseline by which to measure hotel performance. Since 2019 was effectively the last “normal” year we have on record, it provides a useful benchmark by which to judge the recovery of the travel industry as a whole.
For this reason, it can be useful to compare how school district vacations were scheduled in 2019 compared to calendars this year. With an even later Easter in 2019 (April 21), there was a spring break peak similar to what will occur in 2022 around the 45% mark:
Zooming in on April in particular, where the biggest spring break shifts occur between 2019 and 2022, let’s use a different type of visualization to quickly highlight where the ups and downs will contrast the most:
From the weekend of April 9-10, 2022, through the following Thursday (April 14), there will be more students on break each day in 2022 — by between 17 to 19 percentage points compared to 2019. This equates to an increase of roughly 9 or 10 million more students on vacation each of these days in 2022 compared to 2019. On Friday, April 15, this differential will skyrocket to more than 40 percentage points, or approximately 20 million students more on break compared to the matching Friday from April 2019.
On Saturday and Easter Sunday (April 16-17), the percentage of students on break hovers around 45%, but the difference between students on vacation in 2019 is not as large as it will be on Friday.
These differences will balance out over the course of the following two weeks, where significantly lower percentages of students will be on break in the third and fourth weeks of April 2022 compared to matching weeks in 2019. These differentials have a way of balancing out over the course of the school year, since the total number of days that students have to be in the classroom remains consistent from year to year, but knowing exactly when students and their families will be hitting the road to beaches, mountains and other destinations can provide valuable insight in predicting the shifts in travel demand.
Brannan Doyle is research analyst with STR's Market Insights team.
This article represents an interpretation of data collected by CoStar's hospitality analytics firm, STR. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concerns.