A UK grandmother has become the first person in the world to be given the Pfizer Covid-19 injection as part of a mass vaccination program. Today marks the start of the long-awaited fightback against hospitalities’ and everyone’s common enemy, the coronavirus.
Revenue management is the name of the game during the recovery, and every dollar counts as the hotel industry starts to pull itself out of the hole created by COVID-19.
COVID has made it significantly easier to see whether or not pricing and other managerial decisions actually have an impact on your business and you’re not making the mistake of conflating your properties success or failure with the industry’s natural busts and booms.
Analysts are anticipating that the impact of these new vaccines will kick in significantly early next year, seeing positive results likely by summer of 2021. Fingers crossed, life should be back to normal sooner than later by next winter.
There is no denying the hospitality industry, like many industries, was crippled by the pandemic; but just how bad is it compared to last year. A brief statistical overview of Global regions by Smith Travel Research (parent company of Hotel News Now) shows how previously relevant key performance indicators have continued to fall this year in October Compared to October 2019 (STR, 2019)
Central/South America: Occupancy fell 52.7% year over year to 29%, while average daily rate fell 21.4% to $66.68 and revenue per available room was down 62.8% to $19.36.
Middle East/Africa: Hotels in the Middle East saw a 33.8% year-over-year decline in occupancy to 44.2%. ADR was down 23.2% to $108.47, while RevPAR was down 49.2% to $47.96.
Hotels in Africa saw a 56.3% drop in occupancy to 28.6%, with a 3.5% drop in ADR to $101.71 and a 57.8% RevPAR decline to $29.08.
Asia/Pacific: Occupancy dropped 23.2% year over year to 54.1%. ADR was down 23.7% to $74.08, and RevPAR was down 41.4% to $40.07.
Europe: Hotels in Europe saw a 57.8% decline in occupancy to 32.3%, while ADR was down 26.4% to €84.91 ($100.86) and RevPAR declined 69% to €27.39 ($32.53).
The question is now, when will hotel performances recover to pre-COVID levels?
If anyone gives you a day, week or month as an answer to that question…they’re lying. Simply put, nobody knows.
The recovery times between markets and individual properties are expected to vary. Some hotels will recover faster than others, this is an unprecedented crisis, with no historical data to benchmark against and predict outcomes. The future of this challenging time is unknown.
As the vaccine is rolled out in the UK and Canada by the end of the month, we will continue to monitor regions KPI’s as well as Google Trends search term popularity, as it provides an intuitive method of assessing what people are searching for compared to previous lockdowns as well as where those individuals are located.
As difficult as it is to see the positive in the current climate as cases in North America continue to surge, the rollout of the Pfizer vaccine represents a step in the right direction and an important milestone on the road to recovery for the travel and tourism as a whole.
Wyatt Niblett-Wilson, Marketing Coordinator