“The urban markets continue to struggle,” Rogers said. “The secondary and tertiary markets—where you can drive to them and there are outdoor activities such as the beach, mountain hiking and things like that—they’re struggling, but doing a little bit better.”
American hotels were almost half-full for the week ending Aug. 8, according to data analytics company STR. The states with the highest occupancy rates were South Dakota, Montana and Idaho. The lowest were Hawaii and Washington, D.C.
Many Americans who would have opted for hotels in the past are now looking for a place to sleep that’s more, well, socially distanced. Recreational vehicle renting surged which, as national parks reopened, played right into the parallel jump in park and campground traffic. “Many of our campgrounds are having record years, even though they were closed for a couple of months,” said KOA’s Scott.
KOA, which has more than 520 campgrounds across North America, did a survey back in April that found respondents ranked camping as the safest form of travel. August is shaping up to be a great month for campgrounds, Scott said. KOA’s Scott said the campgrounds are equipped with WiFi, so families that are doing work and school remotely could do so from their RVs.
Motels and their outdoor walkways, long dismissed as a seedy, low-rent option, have been big winners. Now, wary travelers are looking for this airy alternative to the traditional hotel, with individual heating and cooling units, Rogers said. They often don’t require elevators, either.
Hotels aren’t losing out entirely to their motel brethren, though. Many have been betting on staycationers to fill rooms. The exact geographic limits of the term are debatable (Merriam Webster calls it “a vacation spent at home or nearby”). But people are interested in the concept nonetheless: “staycation” reached its highest point ever in Google search traffic this summer.
The flexibility brought on by the necessities of the pandemic have had an effect on the way people are scheduling their time away. Hotels are seeing bookings that would normally be limited to the weekend stretched into weekdays, signaling a new flexibility about when guests are traveling, AHLA’s Rogers said. He’s been talking with others in the industry about how to push September as a good time to travel.
But the money isn’t enough to keep the industry afloat for long. Jan Freitag, senior vice president of lodging insights at data analytics provider STR, is skeptical however that staycations are happening in strong enough numbers to make a significant difference. He noted that a key trend has been that economy-class accommodations are outpacing luxury options.
In Savannah, Georgia, Angela Freeman and her son went to a new hotel as a substitute for the cruise they had hoped to take. “I would have rather gone somewhere else,” Freeman said. “But it worked, we got away. It was nice, considering everything going on.” They were at the hotel for just one night, however.
With less travelers coming in, hotels have gotten creative about how to fill their rooms, at least during the day. Red Roof, a chain of more than 500 hotels, began offering rooms for rent during the day as office space for the first time. More than 1,800 rooms have been rented out for a day through the program. Dayuse, a platform that helps people find hotels to use for the day, saw more than 1,000 U.S. hotels requesting to join their platform since the pandemic began, said Head of Sales Mélanie Marcombe.