The saying goes that April showers bring May flowers, and when it comes to hotel performance in the U.S., both the showers and the flowers are boding well for a strong travel year so far, forecasters say.
Hosts of "Tell Me More: A Hospitality Data Podcast," spoke in the latest episode about April's somewhat surprising performance numbers.
Revenue per available room came in at 4.4% growth over the same month last year, which "completely blew my forecast," said STR's senior director of analytics Isaac Collazo. "It went even higher than I thought."
April also notched the third month of average daily rate growth of more than 2% compared to comparable months last year.
"ADR was up 2.8% (in April) and year-to-date is up 2.5% ... and it accounted for most of the monthly and year-to-date RevPAR gain," Collazo said. "About 60% of RevPAR gain came from that ADR change."
It's good news, he said, but he reminded listeners that it's still below the rate of inflation, which stood at 3.8% in April and 3% for the year so far.
Occupancy, while still not at 2019 pre-pandemic levels of growth, is "making headway" Collazo said. "We're seeing real momentum."
World Cup latest
Host Jan Freitag, CoStar's national director of hospitality analytics, shares the latest pre-World Cup hotel information and assures listeners that despite worries about filling hotels and fewer international visitors, "this is going to be a phenomenal event."
"It's not going to be 104 Super Bowls, but there's going to be a tremendous impact," he said. "We think the June early games may not be as attractive ... but in July, for sure, ... yeah, we're going to have full stadiums, we're going to have pretty healthy occupancies and rate growth."
He compared expectations for hotel performance around the World Cup to what Italy's hotels saw for this winter's Olympics, where occupancy rose a bit, but the real gains came with rate growth.
Also in this episode:
- Collazo discussed profit-and-loss trends so far this year, unpacking how total revenue at hotels has been outpacing total expenses, attributed to gains in rooms revenue and food-and-beverage revenue.
- Freitag shared forward hotel bookings information for the entire World Cup tournament range and explained how displacement is playing a role in the numbers appearing lower compared to last year.