Barcelona hotels hit 93% occupancy and a 300% ADR surge during Mobile World Congress, turning a dead winter window into the most profitable week of the year. If your city has a convention center and you're not at the table when they're booking these events, someone else is eating your rate.
Seasonal pricing articles keep recycling the same advice about raising rates in summer and dropping them in winter. The part they never address is what happens inside the 48-hour window where you've already committed to a rate strategy and demand shifts underneath you.
Strong Q1 airline earnings on international routes are a 30-60 day leading indicator for gateway hotel demand, and most properties gutted their international sales infrastructure during COVID and never rebuilt it.
The mid-February national numbers look healthy at $103.35 RevPAR, but the spread between the best and worst performing markets was nearly 50 percentage points. If you're benchmarking against the national average instead of your three-mile radius, you're not managing... you're guessing.
The UK government is investigating whether Hilton, IHG, Marriott, and CoStar used STR benchmarking data to coordinate hotel pricing. If you've ever pulled a comp set report, this one's about you.
