After the hospitality and tourism industry took heavy hits during the two-year pandemic, hoteliers are starting to look forward to the growth of 2023. Even though there are storm clouds ahead, sunny days are approaching. Isaac Collazo, STR Vice President of Analytics, said in a recent CoStar interview, “We have seen a strong recovery over the last 16 to 18 months. We’re looking at a shallow recession, but we’re still planning to see RevPAR growth this year. It’s just going to be different. This will be the first time we’ve gone through a recession with RevPAR growth.”
Despite the impact of the pandemic and recession, leisure travel has stayed strong, increasing above 2019 levels, and is continuing to grow slowly. Even as travelers are looking abroad for leisure travel, Collazo expects the leisure demand of U.S. hotels to remain stable.
Corporate travel is also still recovering from a large gap from pre-pandemic years. According to Collazo, “A lot of the perceptions of this recession will impact travel budgets. The biggest wild card is the large companies. When will the big corporations get back on the road like they were in 2019? That’s still the wild card. Overall, I think it is still a rising tide in business travel.”
The corporate travel numbers are predicted to show in the third quarter whether business travel increased or decreased during the recession.
For hoteliers and property owners, Collazo suggests don’t expect a huge growth trend in 2023. But the slow growth is still growth and will show promise for 2024 and 2025.
For more information on the expectations for 2023, watch the full video here.
MEET
