As many Americans expect to travel during Labor Day weekend, it’s time to get those plans in place ASAP. This is not the time to mess around on “CP” time because gone are the days of waiting to postpone that hotel stay you’ve had postponed since the pandemic began — thinking prices will go down — because by the time you do, it will be gone.
As COVID cases are on the rise in the U.S., hotel demand has not been affected by the new variant yet according to the hotel experts at travel booking technology company Koddi. Koddi. They are reporting that the hotel demand is now at an all-time high.
U.S. demand continued to increase throughout the first half of July, but the rate of increase has slowed over the past week. This coincides with the increase in COVID rates that began at the beginning of the month and increased for four consecutive weeks.
It’s no surprise, considering that search queries for resorts and hotels in the U.S. are at their highest levels in nearly 10 years, according to Google data. The trend also aligns with recent spikes in the purchase of airline tickets. Earlier this year, American Airlines said that its bookings were at 90% of pre-pandemic averages.
2021 demand is currently 23.3% higher than the same week in 2019. Historically, late July and early August have been the busiest travel season and can expect that demand will begin to taper down at a similar pace.
Undoubtedly, this is great news for the travel industry, which was among one of the hardest hit by the global pandemic. The past year was marked by employee furloughs, plummeting occupancy rates and the evaporation of most — if not all — of business travel.
But this news offers glimmers of hope, for post Delta-variant and beyond. 2022 travel booking has already begun, hotel share prices are rising, and if you haven’t noticed tons of new properties are reopening across the globe. Koddi expects Labor Day check-in dates are likely to see large increases in demands over the coming weeks based on historical trends.
