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Leisure demand, while still strong, began to soften in the back half of this year for US hotels, as other parts of the world continued to reopen their vacation destinations and leisure travelers began to once again feel safe traveling abroad. Increases in individual business travel and group business have not yet been able to fully offset this softening. As a result, occupancy levels have declined in each of the past seven months, relative to comparable 2022 levels, and are expected to continue to be down during the remainder of this year and through at least the first quarter of 2024. Room rate growth had played a significant role in the initial recovery for US hotels but softened significantly in Q2 before falling to below inflationary growth levels in Q3. That said, ADR growth is expected to begin to increase and slightly exceed a declining inflation level beginning in Q4 and into next year.
The Fed’s continued increases in its policy rate, continued declines in the public markets since early August, and more recently, the war in Israel have begun to have a downstream impact on hotel demand. Nonetheless, we expect annual occupancy for US hotels this year to increase to 63.0 percent. With declines in occupancies for the balance of this year, we expect average daily room rates to increase 4.5 percent for the year, with resultant RevPAR up 5.2 percent - - approximately 114 percent of pre-pandemic levels, on a nominal dollar basis.
“A continued tightening of financial conditions has begun to have an impact on the overall economy. Since our last issue of Hospitality Directions US in May, we've seen two consecutive quarters of decline in hotel occupancies and expect to see two more in Q4 this year and Q1 2024 before a gradual rebound. We expect to see RevPAR growth to once again exceed PCE inflation beginning in Q2 next year.”
Source: PwC, based on data from STR
PwC Hospitality Directions US is a near-term outlook for the US lodging sector, commonly used by industry decision-makers and stakeholders to better understand the impact of policy and other macro-environmental factors on the sector’s operating performance. Our outlook includes metrics for the overall sector as well as for the chain scales, and is used by our clients for