While supply growth remains muted for much of the Western hotel industry, the Asia-Pacific region has reached all-time highs in hotel development.
Speaking on the latest episode of the CoStar News Hotels podcast, STR's regional vice president in the Asia-Pacific region Jesper Palmqvist said the numbers are somewhat misleading, though.
"Technically it's an all-time high — almost 2,500 projects around, [but] India is about a third of that," he said. "That speaks to the activity in that country."
He said the piece underlying the strong levels of development activity is "lender confidence is coming back," which is also supporting a wave of refinancing across the region.
The downside of that is a generally weaker hotel transactions environment, he said.
But across the region, Japan still remains the favored international investment destination, particularly because it recently showed strong hotel demand could weather the storm of geopolitical strife with China.
"The fundamentals are still strong because we have such strong demand into the region, and even if growth is slower, flights are still coming," Palmqvist said.
For more from STR's Jesper Palmqvist, listen to the podcast embedded above.