Business Travel Recovery Indicated by Hotel Booking Volumes, Net Revenue and ADR

Pegasus Solutions has just issued February’s The Pegasus View, indicating a business travel recovery based on hotel booking volumes, net revenue and average daily rates (ADR). As the only hospitality industry data report that draws from both global distribution system (GDS) and alternative distribution system (ADS) bookings, February’s The Pegasus View is based on the three billion transactions Pegasus processed during the month for more than 95,000 hotel distribution customers worldwide.

Globally, the GDS channel, which consists predominantly of business travel bookings, realized February 2010 bookings increases of +3.59%, a jump in net revenue of +2.96% and a rise in ADR of +0.95% over February 2009. North America returned strong performance on the booking front, surpassing February 2009 by +8.58%. Other regions, not realizing the bookings boost, did sustain higher length of stays (2.21 versus 2.14) than North America, and ADR that has trended 15% to 21% higher than North America for the last 14 months.

“Hotels worldwide have been holding their breath for business travel to recover,” said Mike Kistner, chief executive officer of Pegasus Solutions. “February figures are suggesting they can possibly exhale…a little. Regionally, the challenges hotels face in this recovery are different. North America is still contending with length of stay, which means that corporate travel is occurring, just in a lessened capacity. All other regions, however, have the rates and length of stay hoped for in North America but are not attracting the same volumes.”

The ADS again showed positive growth in bookings, increasing +15.26% over February 2009. Comprised of mostly leisure bookings, this channel has been plagued by aggressive rate shopping, which has ADR currently running at less than 80% of 2008 and 2007 levels. Even with booking volume up +42.73% over February 2007, these depressed rates still have global ADS revenue down -0.39% for the same period.

 Data reported in The Pegasus View comes from Pegasus Solutions through the four GDS (Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre, and Worldspan) and ADS.

See recent travel news from: Travel News Asia, Pegasus, February 2010