NEW YORK—Third quarter hotel industry performance continued to strengthen with Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR) up 3.4 percent in comparison to the previous year, according to data from the TravelClick North American Distribution Review (NADR; Fourth Quarter 2012). The NADR aggregates hotel bookings by channel for the transient segment which includes individual leisure and business travelers.
For the third quarter, the channels that experienced the most growth include Brand.com (bookings through a hotel’s website) with a 6.0 percent increase in demand and online travel agencies (OTAs) with 5.8 percent increase. When looking at specific OTAs, merchant OTAs, those that provide detailed hotel information, are growing stronger than opaque OTAs, those that do not tell consumers the name of the hotel until after it’s booked. This is due to lower available inventory to these channels as hotels are relying less on heavy discounts.
ADR was the lead driver of growth in Q3, experiencing a 4.0 percent increase overall. OTA’s experienced the most rate growth with a 7.9 percent increase. Global distribution systems (GDS) and Brand.com experienced ADR increases of 3.6 and 2.6 percent respectively, compared to a year ago.
The following table illustrates the share of transient room night by channel based on current reservations.
Third Quarter Transient Demand Share by Channel
Brand.com, Hotel Websites 26.5%
Voice 17.4%
Direct to Hotel 24.6%
GDS 18.2%
OTA 13.3%
“Brand.com is the fastest growing booking source and will continue to be an important marketing asset and booking agent in 2013,” said Tim Hart, Executive Vice President, Research and Development at TravelClick. “ADR is currently the key driver of revenue for hotels, and demand outlook mostly remains the same across the distribution channels as we finish out the rest of the year.”
