Pricing power in leisure travel destinations and airport markets continue to keep the U.S. hotel industry recovery on track despite hotels being less than half occupied on average.

In the latest data from CoStar hospitality analytics firm STR, U.S. hotel occupancy was below 50% for a second straight week, but higher rates pushed hotel revenue per available room up 9% from the previous week.

At 48.8%, occupancy for the week ending Jan. 15 was 10 percentage points lower than it was in the comparable week of 2019. Against comparable weeks going back to 2000, it ranked in the bottom third of results.

The latest weekly data shows the occupancy gap to 2019 expanding. However, U.S. hotel average daily rate was just below 2019 levels for the week. As a result of both week-over-week occupancy and ADR growth, RevPAR advanced 9% to $122, which was 82% of what it was for the same week of 2019 — a 1% weekly improvement in the index to 2019.

The continued heavy lifting of leisure travel demand is evidenced by the better performance of hotels on weekends, as well as the lower performance of hotels in large, urban markets.

Weekday occupancy continued to be a drag on performance even though it was up two percentage points from the previous week to 45.3%, which was among lowest weekday occupancy since early 2021. Sunday occupancy was particularly low at 39.2% before Monday through Wednesday occupancy hit 46.5%, but those three days were more than 14 percentage points lower than the same days of 2019.

Read the full article at HotelNewsNow (part of CoStar)