by Calculated Risk on 2/28/2020 09:48:00 AM

From HotelNewsNow.com: STR: US hotel results for week ending 22 February

The U.S. hotel industry reported mostly negative year-over-year results in the three key performance metrics during the week of 16-22 February 2020, according to data from STR.

In comparison with the week of 17-23 February 2019, the industry recorded the following:

• Occupancy: -2.1% to 63.2%
• Average daily rate (ADR): +0.7% to US$130.55
• Revenue per available room (RevPAR): -1.4% to US$82.55

Of note, U.S. airport hotels reported a 4.8% decrease in occupancy for the week, which was the steepest decline among all location types tracked by STR. The decline was steeper in airport markets outside of the country’s 10 busiest.

“The obvious question is whether a dip in demand in airport hotels was directly connected to the coronavirus outbreak,” said Jan Freitag, STR’s senior VP of lodging insights. “However, one week of data is not sufficient for STR to make that correlation, especially considering last week was rather weak around the country in general—possibly due to extended vacations after Presidents’ Day.

“We’ve maintained that we do expect to see a coronavirus impact in U.S. hotel performance data, especially in gateway cities that have historically seen a large number of Chinese arrivals. We’ll continue to monitor the data each week. The next few weeks will be especially interesting considering the news to come out of the CDC on Tuesday.”
emphasis added

The following graph shows the seasonal pattern for the hotel occupancy rate using the four week average.

Click on graph for larger image.

The red line is for 2020, dash light blue is 2019, blue is the median, and black is for 2009 (the worst year probably since the Great Depression for hotels).

2020 is off to a decent start, however, STR notes that the new coronavirus could have a significant negative impact on hotels.