Revenue per available room at U.S. hotels increased year-over-year in August, the 66th straight month, despite a challenging comparison to last year's stats. Labor Day weekend began at the end of August in 2014, skewing last year's figures. Still, STR reports that RevPAR was up by 2.2 percent for the month, and average daily rate climbed by 3.6 percent. Occupancy was down by 1.4 percent, however, as a result of the skewed comparison.
Room demand declined for the first time since October 2009. "Well, 'decline' is sort of a harsh word," noted STR senior VP of lodging insights Jan Freitag. "A 0.3% demand drop is basically flat performance. In August, the industry lost some 306,000 rooms compared with last year. That said, total demand was still just below 110 million room nights which, by the way, is the fourth-best room-demand month ever."
Denver reported the only double-digit growth in average daily rate and RevPAR, up by 10 percent and 11.5 percent, respectively. New York saw the largest drop in average daily rate, dipping by 3.3 percent.