Hospitality data analytics firm STR has just released the details of an unprecedented fall in U.S. hotels' key performance metrics for the week of March 8-14, 2020, in a year-over-year comparison.
STR's data indicates that the U.S. market's 'revenue per room available' (RevPAR) fell by 32.5 percent over the seven-day period, further compounding upon the previous week's decline of 11.6 percent.
Reporting on a March 19 webinar, Travel Weekly quoted STR's senior vice president of lodging insights, Jan Freitag, as saying, "Just putting in last week's data compared to this week's data, what you see is that things went from bad to worse rapidly. And, I'm afraid that we're going to be on a downward trajectory that's going to be with us for a while." He speculated, "Next week's data is likely going to be worse than what we saw this week. I don't think that 32.5 percent is the trough."
Freitag pointed out that this latest RevPAR slide threatens to surpass even the worst slumps felt in the wake of 9/11 and during the 2008 economic crisis. The steepest of those declines, respectively, was a 38 percent drop for the week of September 22, 2001, and a 25 percent drop during the week of September 12, 2009.
Freitag also noted, however, "After those steep declines post-9/11 and post-2009, the data got consecutively less bad."
These performance downturns were spread uniformly across all chain scales, classes and location types. STR reported that each of the nation's top 25 markets registered double-digit decreases in occupancy and revenue per room available (RevPAR), with average daily rate (ADR) numbers also down in all of them.
Fourteen of those top 25 U.S. markets recorded occupancy rates of under 55 percent for the week ending March 14. Seattle, Washington felt the harshest declines in each of the three key metrics categories, with occupancy down 55 percent, ADR falling nearly 25 percent and RevPAR declining by 66 percent.
The San Francisco/San Mateo region of California posted the week's second-worst occupancy rate, falling approximately 52 percent, with ADR down 24 percent and RevPAR dropping by more than 63 percent. New York, New York, experienced the third-steepest declines in occupancy, down 44 percent, and RevPAR, which fell by almost 55 percent.
"The questions we are hearing the most right now are around how far occupancy will drop and how long this will last. Through comparative analysis of the occupancy trends in China and Italy over the past weeks, we can with certainty say that we are not yet close to the bottom in the U.S.," Freitag commented in STR's report.
"However, the timeline for that decline and the eventual recovery are much tougher to predict because there is still so much uncertainty around the COVID-19 case numbers in the U.S. and how serious citizens are when practicing social distancing. China and Italy saw a more abrupt decline in occupancy because of stricter lockdowns. That will dictate the speed of recovery," he said.
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