More than 70 percent of 2009 corporate rate negotiations are complete and "rate achieved is roughly flat to last year

," said Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide executive vice president and CFO Vasant Prabhu. "With retail rates still tracking materially above corporate negotiated rates, we expect rate realization to be at contracted levels. There appears to be significant hesitation among travel decision-makers to make commitments while they wait for their own budgets to be defined, and as they monitor the impact of the recession and the actions coming out of government on their own businesses. As such, we see a lot of pent up demand which could come into the market at some point, but it is hard to predict exactly when."