Smith Travel - Weekday vs. Weekend Breakdown

A great article from Amanda Hite from Smith Travel - Weekday vs. Weekend Travel

"During a downturn, a natural strategy is to modify pricing by day of the week, focusing on where you believe you have the best opportunity to maximize revenue. Typically, this will be the days where your demand, and therefore occupancy, are the strongest. "

More and more Revenue Managers are scraping the barrels looking for any last Revenue to manage. It becomes all that more important now to have a strong Revenue Management team than ever due to the current economic climate. Supply in hotels has remained the same or even increased, but the amount of demand has decreased significantly, so hotels are forced to all fight for the less amount of business coming in, at the benefit of the consumer. Whats that, you're biggest client last year paying $109 a night was just offered a room rate of $79 across the street from your competitor? Welcome to rate integrity bailout and what appears to be happening in a lot of places. Paired with Trade-Down, Luxury & Upscale brands are hurting as Corporate Transient business is trading down and becoming more cost-conscious.

One primary statistic to notice here is there is absolutely no situations where Occupancy Increases and ADR Decreases. This is very very important to the Hotel RevPAR bottom line as we know that getting back to original ADR levels after the 2001 Travel drop took us up to 6 years to bounce back rates. Midscale w/out Food & Beverage is our closest percentage by having a increase in Weekday Occupancy followed by a slightly stronger ADR increase.

"In the upscale segment, the ADR premium for the weekday is 14.7 percent. It appears this segment is dropping its rates on the weekend to drive demand, with the ADR difference in the weekday over weekend ADR at about $15. As you can see in the charts, the RevPAR premium for the weekday in this segment is 27.3 percent. It appears that by dropping the rate by $15 on the weekend, this segment isn’t driving occupancy, and the RevPAR suffers substantially compared to the weekday numbers."