The Easter holiday may seem like forever ago, but the U.S. hotel industry is still feeling its negative effects. Add in the persistent drag of inflation and other economic factors, and U.S. hotel performance isn't looking particularly rosy.

But in the latest episode of "Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast,” CoStar National Director of Hospitality Analytics Jan Freitag and STR Vice President of Analytics Isaac Collazo dive into the data to see where performance bright spots may be — and where they definitely are not.

"April was really strong," Collazo said, citing industrywide revenue per available room gains of 2% over the same time last year. But he warned hoteliers to "not get overly excited about that ... because in March it was down by 2%. ... so when you combine March and April, RevPAR was down 0.1%."

The reason? The Easter holiday shift throws the whole period off, Collazo said.

On top of that, average daily rate continues to decelerate, and year-to-date RevPAR is only up 0.5%.

"That is the lowest April year-to-date RevPAR growth in a non-recessionary period that we've ever recorded," Collazo said, adding that the trends are getting him "a little worried about what's happening as we get into the summer season."

Freitag said that despite the worrying overall numbers, "we are seeing two very different storylines play out" at the high end versus the low end of hotel segments.

Higher-end segments continue to juice the numbers. For March and April combined, upscale and upper-upscale segments were the only ones that saw RevPAR growth, Collazo said. And where luxury hotels saw significant growth was in occupancy — the segment posted occupancy gains of 3.2%.

On the other side of the chain-scale segments, economy RevPAR was down 5.2% in March and April combined compared to the same period last year.

"The good news is that midscale was down much less ... in terms of RevPAR, and upper midscale is flat," Collazo said.

The consensus, according to Collazo: "I believe it's the type of traveler," he said. "Especially lower-income and ... middle-income are just being squeezed out of travel, because of the high cost of living."

Collazo and Freitag talked about other indicators that illustrate that while travelers at all income levels still want to travel, they're finding different ways to be more cost-effective about it.

Freitag pointed to the Travel Security Administration screening data that continues to show record numbers of travelers passing through airports as "a positive indicator of people wanting to travel," but acknowledging that "just because you're on the road doesn't necessarily mean you're staying in a hotel."

"The question is just where they're spending their money," he said.

Both cited alternative accommodations, friends and family, and even more all-inclusive travel such as cruises as potential hotel share-stealers right now.

Freitag and Collazo keep returning to the concept of bifurcation, where lower-end hotels see very different trends than higher-end hotels do.

A lot of that comes from "the wealth effect," Freitag said, where "people just feel wealthier on the upper end" thanks to stock market gains.

But the other part is "OPM, or other people's money," he said, underlined by the continued demand for business and conference travel.

Other topics in this episode include:

• Collazo's prediction that the U.S. hotel industry may be in a period of stagnation in terms of demand and RevPAR. "There's always been a relationship between GDP and [hotel] demand," he said. "And now that relationship is somewhat broken." He explains an exercise in mapping GDP against hotel demand by chain scale and what it revealed.
  
• Freitag's current take on the extended-stay hotel sector, given the latest round of new brand launches and developer interest. His analysis shows that the demand growth rates the segment saw coming out of the pandemic have dropped while supply has gone up more than 3%.
  
• How higher-end and group-focused hotels continue to drive transactions.
  
• In each episode, speakers share a fun metaphor that illustrates the hotel industry at the moment. In this episode, Freitag talked about the apt double-meaning a conference warning had about pyrotechnics. Collazo, meanwhile, digs deep into Electric Light Orchestra's discography, comparing hotel performance to the band's 1981 song "Hold On Tight."

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