U.S. hotel average daily rate, occupancy and revenue per available room all rose last month, per benchmarking company STR, despite the fact that the company this month downgraded its RevPAR forecast for the year from 2.3 percent growth to 2 percent. The downgrade owed to the fact that RevPAR came in worse than expected for the first quarter.
U.S. RevPAR rose 2.5 percent year over year in May to $91.01. Occupancy increased 0.9 percentage points to 68.7 percent, while average daily rate rose 1.6 percent to $132.43. The industry now has posted year-over-year RevPAR growth for 110 of the past 111 months. "The industry sold 3 million more room nights than last May and continued the trend of monthly performance records with modest year-over-year growth," said STR SVP of lodging insights Jan Freitag. "While we did downgrade our forecast for 2019 as a whole, we are expecting solid performance for the summer months, with U.S. air travel bookings and vacation intentions on the incline."
Among the 25 U.S. markets with the most rooms, Denver showed the largest May RevPAR increase at 7 percent year over year, driven by a 3.6 percent gain in occupancy and a 3.3 percent rise in average daily rate. Chicago showed the highest lift in occupancy, at 4.3 percent. Philadelphia's ADR jumped the most, by 5.6 percent. San Diego had the largest drop in occupancy, at 4.4 percent, and Seattle registered the steepest declines in both RevPAR, 9.8 percent, and ADR, 6.2 percent. "Seattle, with supply up 6 percent from last May, is a good example of a major market that saw pressure on performance levels due to new inventory," Freitag said. "Most of the other markets saw enough demand to absorb that new supply in May."
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