Hotels To Be Half-Filled This Year, AHLA Predicts

The bottom line of any business will tell its story, and the American Hotel & Lodging Association says it will have a good story to tell about its industry – but not until 2022.

In its State of the Hotel Industry forecast, the AHLA said it expects nationwide hotel occupancy to average 52.4 percent for 2021, meaning almost half of all U.S. hotel rooms will sit empty this year.

Although that figure is above 2020’s annual average occupancy level of 44 percent, it remains well below 2019’s average of 66 percent.

In addition, the AHLA says U.S. hotel room revenue for 2021 is predicted to remain 34 percent below 2019 levels, at around $110.5 billion.

The organization is also concerned with the hotel industry’s inordinate unemployment rate, which was close to 19 percent as of December of 2020.

“Job losses have been massive,” said AHLA CEO Chip Rogers during the online forum on Thursday. “And even though we’ll see an uptick in jobs in our industry [this year], we’re not going to be anywhere close to where we were in 2019.”

In large part, the drop in hotel room occupancy can be traced to the loss of business travel, which Rogers and the AHLA predict will still be down 85 percent this year compared to 2019, saying it was “the most damaging part of the economic impact we have seen so far.”

On the leisure travel front, however, the forecast is significantly brighter. The report cited recent AHLA consumer survey results indicating that 56 percent of Americans say they are likely to travel for leisure or vacation in 2021 – right at the 58 percent of Americans who said they stayed in a hotel at least one night a year for leisure in 2019.