HENDERSONVILLE, Tenn. — The Canadian hotel industry recorded steep year-over-year declines across the three key performance metrics during the week of April 4 to 11, 2020, according to data from STR.
In a year-over-year comparison, the industry reported an 81.2-per-cent drop in occupancy to 12 per cent, a 33.8-per-cent decrease in Average Daily Rate (ADR) to $101.34 and an 87.6-per-cent decrease in Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) to $12.17. This data reflects further declines from the week ending April 4, 2020, which saw occupancy of 12.8 per cent, ADR at $105.19 and RevPAR of $13.42.
In a webinar examining the week’s data, Jan Freitag, STR’s SVP of Lodging Insights, noted these results “will likely not get much worse.” He also shared date indicating 14.5 per cent of Canadian rooms were closed as of April 16 (approximately 66,000 out of 450,000 rooms). “We fully expect a large majority of these rooms to open up again,” he stressed. “If [properties] don’t make it through, there will likely be ownership changes, but I don’t foresee a large [number of properties] actually closing permanently.”
Quebec once again reported the steepest declines in occupancy and RevPAR, which fell 90.5 per cent to 6.2 per cent and 93.8 per cent to $6.38 for the week, respectively. Ontario experienced the largest drop in ADR, which fell 38.6 per cent to $101.13.
Occupancy for all major Canadian markets was below 17 per cent for the week and each saw RevPAR declines of more than 85 per cent. Vancouver and Ottawa were the only major markets to report double-digit occupancy for the week, with occupancies of 16.6 per cent and 11.5 per cent respectively.
Montreal experienced the most significant decline in both RevPAR and occupancy, which fell 94.6 per cent to $6.63 and 91.1 per cent to 6.4 per cent, respectively. Toronto saw the week’s steepest drop in ADR — a 41.1-per-cent decrease to $118.96.
Performance data by hotel tier continued to show similar results to recent weeks, with luxury and upper-upscale hotels being the hardest hit. RevPAR for the week fell 97.7 per cent within Canada’s luxury class hotels and 95 per cent for the upper-upscale market. By comparison, midscale hotels — the best performing class in the set — saw RevPAR decline 76.3 per cent for the week. STR’s webinar diving into the U.S. and Canadian results for this week marked the last scheduled installment in this weekly series. Nick Minerd. senior director, Communications, STR, noted that webinars would resume for the market once “there is a different story to tell.”
