Summer can't last forever, and neither can hotel performance highs, especially after the standout June and July gains that U.S. hotels posted this year.
However, the trajectory U.S. hotels are taking in August and September is entirely normal and still positive, say STR's Isaac Collazo and CoStar's Jan Freitag, co-hosts of "Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast."
Revenue per available room growth slowed to 2% in U.S. hotels in August, down from 8.3% in July and 8.6% in June; average daily rate growth fell to 1.5% and demand growth to 0.8%.
The main reason for the dip? Calendar shifts.
August had one more Monday and one fewer Friday than August 2025, which "created about a 0.8 percentage point drag on RevPAR alone," Collazo said.
The other factor was the shift of the Labor Day three-day weekend back one week.
What a difference a week makes, Collazo explained. The first three weeks of August notched okay performance. It was just the holiday week that brought it down.
"It really is the last week versus the first three weeks," he said.
Freitag reminded listeners that current performance trends all feed into CoStar's larger forecast for the year.
"Our year-to-date data is going to decelerate," Freitag said, reminding listeners of the company's revised forecast calling for 2026 to end with 4.4% RevPAR growth. "We're going to drip, drip, drip, step down to 4.4 at the end of the year, in line with our current forecast. That is not bad. It just means that the data that we're going to report is not going to have a five handle on it. That is not expected."
Freitag wondered aloud whether that expected deceleration could be called "more normal," while Collazo countered that he would characterize it as "more disciplined."
Also in this episode:
- Freitag digs into the strategy of forecasting 2027 hotel performance by separating June and July versus the rest of the year, to account for World Cup comps.
- Labor Day 2026 long weekend had the most hotel demand ever for a Labor Day weekend, with 12.4 million room nights, up 3.6% over last year's Labor Day weekend. The previous high was set last year in 2025.