When it comes to coronavirus, Texas is also a study in political worlds colliding.
Unfortunately, in our seventh week of studying gateway travel markets, we have discovered political decisions and the resulting social response may have a greater impact on hotel performance than raw case count or unemployment statistics.
This makes our job of forecasting even more challenging.
Despite the political infighting and inconsistencies, Dallas’ forecast hotel occupancy rate for May is 12%, with a year-over-year (YoY) RevPAR decline of nearly 88%.
Each of these figures is in the same realm as Los Angeles, which also leads its state in case counts and deaths per capita.
It will be interesting to see how Dallas and Los Angeles compare in the future, as Los Angeles and California have been tightly aligned in their approaches to combating the virus, whereas alignment has been a struggle for Dallas and Texas.
Over the coming months, by teaming up with the data science team at LodgIQ, Phocuswright is evaluating a broad swathe of hotel-related and other data across a variety of key metropolitan
areas.
Our key objectives are to model the:
- Level of disruption
- Duration of disruption
- Shape of the recovery curve
The goal is to understand the similarities and differences in hotel market dynamics between destinations.
This is especially relevant, as some markets may have yet to peak in terms of the level of infections, while others are seeing active coronavirus case counts decline.
The eighth COVID-19 Hotel Forecast report, written by Robert Cole, covers the Texan business center of Dallas. It is available for free below (download here).