With summer leisure travel season essentially in the rearview mirror, hotel analysts are sounding early cautions about future travel disruptions.
Isaac Collazo, senior director of analytics for STR and co-host of "Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast," raised a red flag about August hotel performance on the latest episode.
Compared to the 2024 calendar, this August "loses a Thursday and gains a Sunday," he said. "We have five Sundays in August. That's not a good thing."
Sunday traditionally falls in the gray area of being too late to count as a weekend proxy for leisure travel, and too early in the week to be a popular stayover night for business travel.
The result of an extra Sunday?
"We're probably set to see the largest [revenue per available room] decrease since March of 2024, when it dropped by 2%," Collazo said.
Looking ahead to September, holiday shifts mean the month will have "only two full weeks in the middle ... for business and group travel," he added.
The U.S. Labor Day holiday falls at the beginning of September this year, and Rosh Hashanah takes place from Sept. 22 to Sept 24. Companies typically avoid both holidays when scheduling conferences, meetings and other business events.
Looking ahead to October, Collazo said the calendar is pretty clear, since more informal holidays, like Halloween and Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples' Day, don't typically conflict with business travel scheduling.
Yom Kippur falls in early October this year, but compares nearly exactly with Rosh Hashanah last year, resulting in less of a year-over-year impact on the month.
"October should be good, but August and September? Not so good," Collazo said.
Bright spots
Still, plenty of locations are proving to be travel bright spots.
Podcast co-host Jan Freitag, national director for hospitality market analytics at CoStar, cited Canada as the obvious example.
"Year-to-date RevPAR in the U.S. is up 0.4%. Canada, in Canadian dollars, is up 4%, or 10 times the growth rate we're seeing here," Freitag said.
Hotel room demand also has steadily increased in Canada over the last three months, underscoring what Freitag called "a move to buy Canadian" following inflammatory headlines and tariff talk that strained the traditionally good U.S./Canada relationship earlier this year.
Also in this episode
- Collazo calls out performance bright spots in certain locations and chain scales, most notably in urban and suburban markets including Chicago, St. Louis and Birmingham, Alabama.
- Freitag points out the "noteworthy-slash-scary" stat in July showing that luxury class hotels, consistently the outperformer, grew average daily rate by only 1.8%, marking the first time this year that figure fell below the rate of inflation.