New U.S. hotel bookings for the second quarter of 2020 are down significantly year over year but begin to lift the latter half of the third quarter, according to a hotel revenue strategy technology company Duetto's Pulse Report, a new product that tracks hotel cancellations, bookings and web traffic based on data compiled from the 3,500 properties on its platform.
For example, new U.S. hotel bookings made during the week of March 30 for September show a year-over-year decline of 45 percent, but by October those bookings are down just 6 percent. Still, the report notes that each week on the graph shows that the two most recent weeks perform worse year-over-year than the three prior weeks, meaning "we haven't quite reached the bottom."
The findings are available for North America, Asia/Pacific and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
While the data for the three key performance indicators is pretty stark at the moment, "there are indications that that there is some potential for recovery," Duetto CEO David Woolenberg told BTN, adding that a hotelier could use the report to help decide when to reopen a currently closed property and to assess staffing levels as well as operational and pricing decisions to "help them recover revenues and profits in the coming months."
The current report, published April 16, shows performance for each of five weeks between March 2 and April 5. It will be updated every two weeks. For the U.S., there was more than a 900 percent increase for cancellations in April compared with a year prior. Significant increases in cancellations continue through July, but begin to level off in August. During the week of March 30-April 5, for example, year-over-year cancellations made for August were down 24 percent. This trend remains steady through the end of 2020.
Hotel website activity is down significantly for each of the five weeks in the report, with visitors the week of March 2 dropping from nearly 4 million in 2019 to about 1 million in 2020. The report includes the percentage of brand-dot-com users who left the site without booking a room, identified in the report as "regrets." A larger portion of 2020 visitors are booking before they leave than in 2019, according to the report. For the week of March 30, for example, 25 percent of visitors to brand-dot-com sites booked hotel rooms in 2020, compared to 12 percent in 2019.
Duetto plans to publish the report for the foreseeable future "as long as it provides value," and "hopefully we will add new [key performance indicators] as we find them," Woolenberg said.
"This is an unprecedented time," he said. "We wanted to give something of value to hopefully start to get some optimism about the recovery, even though it's difficult right now. We wanted to give something back not just to our customers, but also to the industry."