UK’s airport hotels see bright side of freeze

The recent freeze across the United Kingdom brought with it contrasting fortunes for hotel operators, STR Global has said.

The recent freeze across the United Kingdom brought with it contrasting fortunes for hotel operators, STR Global has said.

Daily data from STR Global, a provider of market data to the world’s hotel industry, showed recent adverse weather and road conditions reduced people’s desire to travel locally. Guests were forced either to cancel their plans to travel or to stay in hotels as airports were closed.

STR Global’s data for the UK for the first working week of 2010 (Sunday, January 3 to Saturday, January 9) compared to the same period in 2009 (Sunday, January 4 to Saturday, January 10) showed marginal declines in all three performance measures: occupancy, average daily rate (ADR) and revenue per available room (RevPAR).

According to STR Global, hotels in regional UK performed worse, even though the results for the UK as a while were buoyed by the improved performance at two airport destinations (Heathrow and Gatwick) as well as London and Edinburgh. (Edinburgh was the only regional city to show RevPAR growth.)

“The adverse weather conditions put a damper on otherwise improving market conditions as hotels reported improving occupancy levels across the UK for the month of December,” said Elizabeth Randall, managing director of STR Global. “Especially London showed a good performance benefiting from the weakness UK exchange rate.”

STR Global provides clients-including hotel operators, developers, financiers, analysts and suppliers to the hotel industry-access to hotel research with regular and custom reports covering Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and South America.

About the author

Avatar of Linda Hohnholz

Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

Share to...