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Thursday, April 09, 2020

Hotels: Occupancy Rate Declined 68.5% Year-over-year to All Time Record Low

by Calculated Risk on 4/09/2020 09:51:00 AM

From HotelNewsNow.com: STR: US hotel results for week ending 4 April

Reflecting the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. hotel industry reported significant year-over-year declines in the three key performance metrics during the week of 29 March through 4 April 2020, according to data from STR.

In comparison with the week of 31 March through 6 April 2019, the industry recorded the following:

Occupancy: -68.5% to 21.6%
• Average daily rate (ADR): -41.5% to US$76.51
• Revenue per available room (RevPAR): -81.6% to US$16.50

“Data worsened a bit from last week, and certain patterns were extended around occupancy,” said Jan Freitag, STR’s senior VP of lodging insights. “Economy hotels continued to run the highest occupancy, while interstate and suburban properties once again posted the top occupancy rates among location types. This shows there are still pockets of demand while more than 75% of the rooms around the country are empty. We don’t expect any material change in the magnitude of RevPAR declines for the time being.”
emphasis added
The following graph shows the seasonal pattern for the hotel occupancy rate using the four week average.

Hotel Occupancy RateClick 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 was off to a solid start, however, COVID-19 has crushed hotel occupancy.

Note: Y-axis doesn't start at zero to better show the seasonal change.

This is the lowest weekly occupancy on record, even considering seasonality.  Note the graph is a 4-week average.