U.S. hotel demand dipped slightly week to week in the latest data from STR, but the hotel industry continued to perform at pandemic-era-high levels.
For the second straight week, according to data reported in standard STR methodology, the U.S. hotel industry sold more than 21 million rooms — a level not reached since before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020. However, U.S. hotel demand for the week ending March 27 was down 350,000 rooms from the previous week — equivalent to each U.S. hotel on average selling 10 fewer rooms.
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According to STR’s “Market Recovery Monitor,” which benchmarks the latest weekly performance against the comparable week in 2019, demand for the week of March 27 was 83% of the level reached during the comparable week in 2019.
Hotel average daily rate for the week of March 27 was 82% of 2019 levels — the highest index of the past 29 weeks.
The “Market Recovery Monitor” places the industry and its markets into one of four categories, based on ratios achieved by dividing current RevPAR performance against performance in the comparable week in 2019:
- Depression: Markets with an index of 50 or below against the benchmark;
- Recession: Markets with an index of between 50 and 79.9;
- Recovery: Markets with an index of between 80 and 99.9; and
- Peak: Markets with an index of 100 or higher.
Ratios of 100 or more outperformed the benchmark, and below 100 underperformed.
For the week of March 27, the U.S. hotel industry remained in the recession category, though at the second-highest index of the pandemic era — behind only the week of March 20.
A higher percentage of hotels were classified as in recovery, as the number of hotels in the depression category was the lowest since the start of the pandemic.
