The throughline to all U.S. hotel performance data this year? There's always more to the story.
Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast co-hosts CoStar's Jan Freitag and STR's Isaac Collazo reminded listeners in the December episode of the podcast — as they've done all year — that context is key when parsing hotel performance data that on first glance looks dismal.
In this episode, the two look back on Freitag's predictions for 2025 to see what he got right, what was a miss and what needed extra context.
Listen to the episode embedded above to hear Frietag and Collazo's responses to questions like:
- Will room rate growth beat inflation?
- Will small meetings continue to drive full-service hotel results?
- Will international inbound demand rebound?
- Will the number of hotels with ADR of over $1,000 continue to rise?
- How will hoteliers react to climate change?
November US hotel performance
The two unpacked U.S. hotel performance in November, finding more examples to add context around not-great overall numbers.
November had one extra Sunday (the lowest-earning revenue per available room day of the week) and lost a Friday (the second-highest RevPAR earner of the week) compared to last year, which contributed to the month's 2.3% RevPAR drop compared to last year.
And the performance drag caused by comparisons to 2024's hurricane season persist today and will into the first quarter of 2026, Collazo warned.
Luxury hotels continue to outperform other classes and national averages, and group hotel demand is picking up.
"And to give a heads up to people, we are expecting [the fourth quarter] this year to be down," Freitag warned. "We expect December to be negative. So that's going to give us three consecutive quarters of RevPAR decline. And because of that tough comp in [the first quarter] of 2026, we expect Q1 to be slightly negative in RevPAR."
And yet, a nationwide recession isn't in the cards, according to economists.
"We are in a non-recessionary environment with RevPAR deceleration for a year, and that is just mind-boggling," Freitag said. "We're just scratching our heads."