Leisure travel continues to dominate U.S. hotel demand, but PwC expects to see individual business travel and groups lead the demand recovery into 2022, provided Covid-19 infection rates drop, according to the company’s latest Hospitality Directions U.S. outlook, released this week.
PwC projects that 2022 U.S. occupancy levels will reach 61.7 percent, up from the 57.1 percent forecast for 2021, and 4.3 percentage points below 2019’s level of 66 percent.
Average daily rate, the surprise star of this recovery, continues to improve. ADR exceeded 2019 levels in each month of the third quarter of 2021, and PwC now expects the full-year 2021 metric to increase 19.6 percent year over year to $123.48, resulting in revenue per available room growth of 55.1 percent to $70.45, reaching about 82 percent of pre-pandemic levels.
Occupancy was a bigger contributor to RevPAR recovery during the first half of the year, according to PwC, but ADR will become an increasingly important driver…
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