With another set of easy comps against Easter week 2025, U.S. hotel revenue per available room jumped 8.5% on nearly equal gains in occupancy and average daily rate for the week ending April 25.
This marks the third consecutive week of RevPAR gains and the highest weekly occupancy of the year so far at 67.7%, according to data from STR, CoStar's hospitality benchmarking firm. Demand was better than expected, and the year-over-year growth rate mirrored what was seen in 2015, a year that had the same calendar make up as 2026 with Easter falling on the same day, April 5.
While there is no doubt that the same week last year was weaker due to Easter, resulting in strong growth rates, we still believe that something has changed as weekly demand was the highest since October.
A year ago, demand really wasn’t that weak as it only fell by 122,000 room nights year over year while this year it gained more than 1.1 million. Since February, demand has grown every week except for two and that was due to Easter and Passover observances. Demand in the first 115 days of this year is up by more than 8.2 million rooms nights.
This week’s group demand among luxury and upper upscale hotels was also the best since September 2024. It increased by 22% and accounted for all of the demand gain in those hotels as transient was down -0.4%.
Orlando and San Diego saw the largest declines in transient demand, which we attribute to the change in spring break travel. A year ago, a fair number of families with school age children were on vacation due to the late Easter.
A broader review of markets revealed that the top 25 markets saw the largest RevPAR gains at 11.9%, fueled by strong demand and ADR growth.
The growth was widespread, with all but four top 25 markets seeing flat to declining RevPAR. Leaders included Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, St Louis, and Washington, D.C., where group drove most of the market demand gain and double-digit RevPAR growth.
Most of these markets saw demand growth significantly above the decline they observed a year ago. Eight markets saw their highest weekly demand of the year with seven seeing their highest weekly demand since October. Washington posted its second highest weekly demand of the past six years.
Pittsburgh had the highest RevPAR gain of any market this week, up 71.1% for the week the city hosted a record crowd for the 2026 NFL draft.
Group demand drove demand gains in most markets, but the percentage of group to total demand growth was higher in the top 25 markets versus the remaining ones — 71.8% compared to 51.8%.
Given the predominance of group this week, it’s not surprising that luxury and upper upscale class hotels had the highest weekly RevPAR gains, at 10.1% and 11.5%, respectively. Occupancy for luxury, upper upscale and upscale reached its highest level for these hotels, up 75% for the latter two and 73.7% for the former. Additionally, occupancy for those three classes was among the 10 highest of the past 68 weeks. Luxury and upper upscale hotels combined had the 10th highest occupancy in a 121 week stretch going all the way back to 2024.
Weekdays also outperformed the weekend due to group. Not surprisingly, Sunday saw the largest gain against an easy Easter comp. Demand tapered down and turned negative over the weekend. Weekday RevPAR was up 15.5% with the weekend down 3.3%
In the next two weeks, we expect RevPAR will be flat to down in the week ending May 2nd before rising again in the following week if performance follows the same pattern observed in 2015. The slowdown in performance will be due to slowing demand as conference season gives way to school graduations and the beginning of the summer travel season.
April is on track to see another RevPAR gain. With five days remaining in the month, we predict monthly RevPAR to be around 3.9% due to higher demand and ADR.
Global RevPAR bounces back
Despite the war in Iran, global demand excluding the U.S. rebounded with RevPAR rising 3.8% on a same-store, constant U.S. dollar basis. Italy and Germany led with RevPAR growth of more than 53%. Excluding the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, RevPAR was up 9.7%, mostly on ADR.
GCC RevPAR fell by more than 50%, its seventh weekly decrease. The largest demand decline was again in the U.A.E., where it was down by more than 700,000 room nights.
Weekly RevPAR was down in Australia, Mexico and Latin America. In Mexico, key tourist destinations were again down, which we attribute in part to the shift in spring break from a year ago.
Isaac Collazo is senior director of analytics at STR.