U.S. hotels saw their largest week of year-over-year growth since mid-January 2025, due to an easy comparison against Holy Week 2025.
During the week of April 12-18, U.S. hotel revenue per available room increased 14.6%, driven by a 5.2-percentage-point increase in occupancy and a 5.7% lift in average daily rate. Compared with the same week in 2024, U.S. hotel occupancy was relatively flat and RevPAR increased 4% due entirely to ADR.
Following two weeks of holiday-related declines in room demand, last week’s 8.9% year-over-year increase in hotel demand was a complete reversal of trends. Group demand for luxury and upper-upscale hotels increased by 947,000 rooms sold, recouping over 76% of the group demand losses from the previous two weeks. Group demand accounted for all the aggregate room demand growth last week among upper-tier hotels as transient demand was down for the first time since January.
In the prior fortnight, group demand declined an average of 600,000 rooms each week. The lift in group demand likely reflects calendar-related shifts around Easter, as the amount of group rooms sold last week – 2.3 million – was the highest of the year and the third highest of the past 61 weeks.
Conversely, overall transient hotel rooms sold last week were the lowest since February. We attribute the decrease to the Easter calendar shift as the number of K-12 schools on spring break last week was significantly below the amount a year ago. Transient demand was most affected on weekdays from Sunday to Thursday, declining 4.2%, but rallied over the weekend to bring the weekly decline to 1.2%.
At the market level, the aggregate totals for top 25 U.S. hotel markets and those outside the top 25 performed at very similar levels. The shift from transient demand to group demand was reflected in the types of markets that saw growth this week. After two straight weeks of growth for spring-break hotel markets, Florida, Hawaii and South Carolina all saw sizable performance declines last week, particularly on the weekdays. Weekend transient demand was up as leisure travel to non-spring-break markets such as Nashville and New Orleans saw some of the largest gains.
While spring break has come and gone, travel for experiences remained healthy. During Coachella weekend 1 (April 10-12), Palm Springs, California, saw its highest three-day weekend occupancy (91.9%) from Friday to Sunday since the festival went to its three-day format in 2007. Additionally, going all the way back to 2000, occupancy was the fifth highest for any Friday-to-Sunday span with hotel occupancy on Saturday, April 11, at 95.2%, the highest single day since Feb. 15, 2020. Not only was hotel occupancy high, ADR soared by 16.9% to $636, the highest ever for the three-day span in Palm Springs history, even when accounting for inflation. RevPAR was also at a record high. Preliminary results for Coachella weekend 2 (April 17-19) also showed strong performance with the second weekend’s htoel occupancy the highest of the past four years (86.1%) with a $511 ADR.
Business and conference-driven group demand helped raise overall hotel performance in most markets. Weekday group demand was up in 88% of markets and 24 out of the top 25 markets. Forty-one markets sold more group rooms last week than in any week in 2026. One of those was Washington D.C., which had its highest week of group demand since 2024 due to the IMF & World Bank spring meetings. Atlanta, Chicago and Boston were some of the largest markets where conferences or events drove their largest group demand week of the year.
Performance by class also seemed to flip last week. While every class finished the week with positive RevPAR, ADR and occupancy, luxury hotels were not the leading performers. If you exclude economy hotels, luxury had the smallest percentage growth of the classes in each of these three metrics. From upper-upscale to midscale hotels, the average RevPAR increase per class was 16.5%, while luxury hotels increased just 6.5%. Looking back at week 13 of 2025, when the U.S. had an easy comp against Holy Week in 2024, a similar trend occurred as well. It appears that luxury hotel performance is more agnostic than other classes around calendar shifts, making the class less susceptible to large performance swings during these periods.
Hotels outside the US also bounce back but stayed negative
Comparable global hotel RevPAR on a constant USD basis and excluding the U.S. fell 4.2%, which was much better than the double-digit decrease seen in the prior week. This is the fourth weekly decrease since the U.S.-Iran war began on Feb. 28.
The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries again saw the largest decrease with this week’s decline (-69.4%) the worst of the past six weeks. GCC RevPAR has fallen by more than 66% in each of the past four weeks. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain saw the largest decreases – down more than 80% – the third consecutive week of RevPAR retreating by more 80%. UAE hotel occupancy has been below 30% for the past six weeks.
Mexico continued to see it RevPAR fall, down 26.9% this week on falling ADR. Occupancy was up across most of the country, but down in key tourist destinations including Baja California, Cancun, Mexican Caribbean, and Pacific Central, which we attribute more to the Easter calendar shift than to the recent cartel violence. The ADR decrease continued to be led by higher-end hotels. Like Mexico, Caribbean hotels also saw RevPAR decline 15.2% because of the calendar shift.
On the flip side, strong weekly RevPAR growth was seen in Canada, Germany, and Japan with moderate gains in India, Italy and the U.K.
Cole Martin is an analytics and insights specialist at STR. Isaac Collazo is senior director of analytics at STR.