Every year, the Hotel Business Green Book Directory & Market Guide offers insights from experts on a variety of industry subjects. This year, we are offering even more insight with Green Book Extra.
Hotel Business asked Leslie Ng, CEO, Waramaug Hospitality; Mark Ricketts, president/COO, McNeill Hotel Company; and Jon Rosenfeld, cofounder/managing partner, AWH Partners, for their thoughts on what the future holds.
What is your forecast for the rest of this year and the coming years? How long do you think it will take to get to pre-pandemic levels of occupancy and RevPAR?
Ng: The forecasts for the balance of the year for individual hotels are highly dependent on location and type of hotel. We are extremely optimistic in some of our key drive-to market hotels; we have hotels in Colorado, New York (suburbs), Georgia and Florida, for example, that are doing quite well. Urban markets continue to struggle and will in the foreseeable future until higher levels of business travel return, but every day is usually a little better than the day before. The sun is peaking through.
Ricketts: In our universe of select-service and extended-stay properties, we are seeing continued strong occupancy from multiple demand generators. Like others, having learned from previous downturns, we have been really focused on driving rate whenever possible and it’s been a valuable strategy. Overall, by next year (2022), we will be above 2019 revenues.
Rosenfeld: While occupancy levels vary greatly by market, we do expect the corporate segment and large convention segment to remain significantly down to 2019 for the remainder of this year and start to pick up in late Q1 or Q2 of 2022. Weekend leisure business, sports teams and entertainment business remain strong. We are forecasting November and December occupancy to be up over 50% to last year and we are also seeing stronger ADR lift of almost 30% for the same time period last year. When RevPARs will get back to 2019 levels is certainly the trillion-dollar question, and we believe the answer is very market specific. Some hotels have already exceeded 2019 levels and others may take until 2023 or even beyond.
