After October's decline in the three key metrics used to assess the U.S. hotel industry, November's results returned the opposite, with year-over-year growth across the board—the first time that has happened since July, according to STR. Occupancy rose 0.3 percent to 61.8 percent, average daily rate increased 1 percent to $125.55 and revenue per available room grew 1.3 percent to $77.62.
Still, the outlook for final 2019 numbers and 2020 projections remains muted. "Each of the performance metrics reached a record absolute level for a November, but overall performance growth was well below the long-term average," said STR SVP of lodging insights Jan Freitag. "We're projecting RevPAR increases of less than 1 percent for both 2019 and 2020—those will be the worst year-over-year comparisons in the metric since the recession."
Among the top 25 markets, San Francisco/San Mateo reported the largest year-over-year increase in RevPAR at 21.5 percent, due to the only double-digit lift in ADR (14.2 percent) and the highest rise in occupancy (6.3 percent). Anaheim/Santa Ana, California, reported the second-largest increases in ADR, 7.5 percent, and RevPAR, 10.5 percent. Fifteen of the top 25 markets reported positive RevPAR.
Boston had the steepest decline in each of the three key metrics: Year-over-year occupancy was down 10.5 percent, ADR declined 7 percent and RevPAR decreased 16.8 percent. New York continued to struggle and reported the second-largest declines in ADR, 6.1 percent, and RevPAR, 7.2 percent.
By chain scale, upper midscale saw year-over-year declines in all three key metrics—occupancy by 0.6 percent, ADR by 0.3 percent and RevPAR by 0.9 percent. The luxury market fared the best, with occupancy up 1.5 percent, ADR up 1.9 percent and RevPAR growth at 3.5 percent.
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