Dallas travel agent Alex Ramsey is getting questions daily from customers uncertain about booking holiday trips. “Are Americans allowed to travel to Europe?” “Will hotels and restaurants have enough employees?” And the newest query brought on by recent turbulence: “Will my flight be delayed or canceled?”
A proposal to require all newly built hotels to secure a special permit is one step closer to becoming law in New York City.
As travel picks up amid signs the pandemic is waning, the hotel industry hopes its fortunes will rise too. But so far, it’s not clear when that moment will arrive — or whether some of the changes they have had to make will become permanent.
Much like the 2021 hotel request-for-proposals cycle, this year's negotiation season differs greatly from pre-pandemic ones. Many hotel companies have offered to roll over 2020 rates for a second year, and some buyers—though seemingly not as many as last year—are taking them up on it, with 2021 volume only nominally higher than 2020, and recovery still nascent.
Following Labor Day in the U.S., all eyes are on corporate, midweek demand. According to the latest monthly data from STR, CoStar's hospitality analytics firm, U.S. occupancy stood at 63% in August, a six-point drop from the previous month. However, this decline was expected due to leisure vacations ending and children returning to school.
Hotel profitability has come a long way since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly in the past few months, according to data from STR, CoStar's hospitality analytics firm.
There is a lot of good news to pull out from STR's latest full-year 2021 forecast for the hotel industry — leisure demand surpassing pre-pandemic levels and hoteliers holding rate through the downturn — but a hazy outlook for corporate spending is keeping growth projections for the remainder of the year somewhat muted.
Cornell research: United States hotel prices have rebounded above their statistical lower bound in all regions except the Mountain states, signaling a return toward their pre-pandemic level—although we are not quite there yet. Prices of hotels in gateway cities rose 6 percent, while hotels in non-gateway cities climbed almost 7 percent on average this quarter. Transaction volume also increased for both large hotels and small hotels, with large hotels rising 79 percent and small hotels, 57 percent on a quarter-over-quarter basis.
A full recovery of the U.S. hotel sector relies on the return of three sources of room demand: leisure travelers, corporate transient and large industry and private groups.
The retail market faced challenges before COVID-19 hit. The office market was solid before the pandemic sent employees working from home in droves. But the hospitality market? It was thriving in many parts of the country before March of 2020.
U.S. hotel gross operating profit per available room (GOPPAR) reached its highest absolute level since February 2020, according to STR's February 2021 monthly P&L data release.
Billionaire investor Barry Sternlicht told CNBC on Wednesday the U.S. travel recovery is well on its way — at least in parts of the country like Florida — after a Covid-induced slowdown.
Fueled by Covid vaccines, flexible cancellation policies and people yearning to break free from home, the summer travel season is already booming for some parts of the travel industry.
Home sharing and Airbnb listings might have fared at least marginally better than the broader hotel industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, but some boutique hoteliers who list on Airbnb said bookings on that and other third-party distribution channels have also taken a significant hit.
Even before the onset of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the hotel industry was undergoing something of a reckoning, said Noble Investment Group Senior Managing Principal and CEO Mit Shah.
Expectations for 2021 are high. Earnings estimates are ticking upwards, the stock market continues to crest, and people talk of a "Roaring '20s" boom as Americans emerge from their COVID cocoons to spend, go out, and travel.
After the events of 2020, quite a bit of the near-term hotel industry outlook is decidedly better, which is not hard to imagine. But just like with all recoveries, the outlook varies by class, location and customer type.
Signs of hope for workers in the hard-hit leisure and hospitality field all but disappeared in November, and their prospects for getting rehired grow bleaker by the month.
As the head of travel and tourism for Boston Consulting Group, Jason Guggenheim is used to troubleshooting on behalf of airlines and hotel companies when the road gets bumpy. Typically that means rethinking operations and carrying out restructuring efforts for sprawling resorts, cruise lines, online travel agencies, or big names in air travel. But even for someone whose job it is to fix the industry's most complicated problems, there's never been a year as turbulent as 2020.
New U.S. hotel industry forecasts from both STR and HVS anticipate that the full-year occupancy level will end the year at around 42 percent, according to information presented by the companies at Thursday's New York University International Hospitality Industry Investment Conference.