During the International Luxury Hotel Association Fast Forward 2020, three hot topics emerged: lodging, authenticity, and luxury travel trends. This article discusses takeaways from the conference regarding these items.
STR and STR Global data through August of 2014 show RevPAR for the luxury class up 5.1% globally. Jan Freitag reported on the U.S., China, Asia- Pacific, and Middle East regions, noting that supply has followed the trend of seemingly unstoppable demand for luxury hotels in the Middle East. Luxury supply growth in the U.S. is also up, especially in New York City. An interesting takeaway from STR was that while New York and San Francisco are running the same occupancies, there has been 0.0% supply growth in San Francisco. This gives San Francisco hotels serious pricing power, and Jan predicts we will be seeing plenty of flag changes in the city to cope with this unanswered increase in demand.
Demand amid the luxury segment in the U.S. is not growing as quickly as in other global markets, even though occupancy has fully recovered and 2014 RevPAR levels as of August are the highest since the recession.
Click here (
Adobe Acrobat PDF file) to download the complete article.