The Florida Keys were effectively cut off from the rest of the world on March 22.
Checkpoints were established at the Monroe County border, prohibiting tourists and other leisure visitors from entering. Strictly enforced rules required documentation of residence or employment within the county.
Only essential workers could be housed in any form of lodging. Passengers arriving at airports were required to self-quarantine for 14 days.
While the Monroe County lockdown has been disastrous for Key West’s hotel business, a major frustration for local hoteliers was the continued online bookings of properties that are closed to visitor arrivals. This was not due to unscrupulous tour operators or wholesalers scamming travelers – but from official sources that travelers would consider trustworthy.
Given the lockdown and housing of essential workers only, Key West’s forecast for May 2020 hotel occupancy was a mere 4% of the May 2019 level, with year-over-year (YoY) revenue per available room (RevPAR) declining 97%. It simply can’t get much worse from a performance perspective.
This further reinforces our conclusion that the inverse relationship between COVID-19 cases and RevPAR is not nearly as predictive as the ramifications of local political lockdown decisions.
Again, as has been demonstrated across other international gateways, the better the public health outcomes resulting from strict lockdowns, the worse the local hotel industry performance.
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 region of Key West. It is available for free below (download here).