Excerpt from CoStar
Forward Bookings Drop in Other Parts of the World
In international hotel markets such as London, Rome and Vienna, hotel occupancy on the books for the next 28 days is down amid concerns over the spread of the omicron variant of COVID-19. However, precedent suggests the impact will be far less on U.S. hotel markets.
Preliminary performance data from CoStar hospitality analytics firm STR shows no impact from the emerging COVID-19 omicron variant on U.S. hotel demand, and patterns suggest any impact in the future will be minimal, according to Jan Freitag, national director for hospitality analytics at CoStar.
"If preliminary news holds and the strain is more contagious but less impactful for people who have received their booster shot, then we expect little impact on the U.S. travel industry," he said in his latest video analysis of the monthly hotel data.
"If we learned one thing from the summers of 2020 and 2021, it is that the American leisure consumer loves hitting the road, no matter the COVID case counts. This was clearly seen in the Thanksgiving data this year which, according to STR, was the single strongest Thanksgiving week ever recorded," he added.
The same cannot be said for other parts of the world, Freitag said. Hotel bookings over the next 28 days are trending down in international markets such as London, Rome, Vienna, Amsterdam, Paris and Madrid.
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