The latest edition of the Pulse Report, which tracks data for the month of May, continues to give hoteliers reasons to hope for a good summer as healthy activity in terms of web traffic, pace, and pick up is still steadily growing across the majority of regions.
Pick up
Recovery is looking steady in EMEA as the velocity of bookings across the region were up for May by an astounding 913% for stay dates in June. In addition, impressive gains were posted through to January next year, providing increased visibility for the balance of the year. This is important as a baseline for the 2022 budget season.
There’s more good news for North America in terms of pick-up as new bookings are up again this month. For bookings made in May 2021, we see the largest jump for stays in June (+116% month-on-month). Both July and August bookings show strong momentum as well with increases of 76% and 98% respectively.
Switching the comparison from month-over-month (MoM) to the same time in 2019, we see yet again a great deal of promise with the gap in new booking activity being closed for June, July, and August to just -13%, -10%, and -11% respectively.
Web Traffic
As hotels begin to reopen, the earliest indicator of future demand in the Duetto application is consumer search behavior on brand.com, which is generally the largest share of a hotel’s channel contribution. For APAC, following months of slow news, there’s finally some movement. Web search activity across APAC increased by 57% MoM for June stay dates and the region also posted big gains during every month in the next 12 months with the exception of December 2021.
Again, EMEA has performed well this month, with the volume of brand.com web searches for hotels and casinos across the region nearly tripling compared to the prior month for stay dates in June and achieving triple-digit growth through to October. There are extremely high levels of web search activity for every month through to May 2022 as well.
In North America, while web traffic for May grew by another 12% MoM and for June by another 34%, we see the largest growth further into the summer months with July +106% and August +102%.
On the Books (OTB)
Pace for North America continues to increase as a result of the strong growth in net new bookings, particularly for the summer months. While for much of the pandemic pace remained behind by 50-55%, more recently we’ve seen steady improvement. In March we saw pace lagging behind 2019 by -40%. In April that improved to -30%, and in May we see it improve further to -12%, which is great news.
For EMEA, while booking pace has jumped exponentially, OTB numbers across the uneven recovering EMEA region have yet to materialize in volumes that exceed the prior year. While OTB ADR is up from last year from July through January 2022 due to many different factors, including market mix shift, OTB rooms remain lower during stay dates starting in September 2021 onwards.
The Duetto Pulse Report is available for free to hoteliers from around the world. It tracks key metrics for North America, Latin America, EMEA and APAC. Subscribe here: https://www.duettocloud.com/pulse-signup