After years in the hospitality consulting business, I always thought about all the cool things one could do with full access to the STR database. Now that I'm with STR Analytics, that wonder has become a reality (dream big, my daddy always said). With a full census database mapped to performance data, I can now easily sort the data to find all kinds of nuggets of information—some useful, some not. Who had the highest revenue per available room in 2009? What city had the highest average rate? What coast had better performance?
With a tip of the hat to Peter King's “Monday Morning Quarterback” column, I now present my own version of Factoids That May Interest Only Me. For the inaugural blog, I wanted to start basic. I thought it would be interesting to look at the profile of the properties that fell both above and below the 2009 average RevPAR.
In 2009, the national average RevPAR was US$53.71. I took our database and split the properties into two groups: Those Above and Those Below. From that, I was then able to look at some of the qualities of each group. Some quick facts:
- Those Below outnumbered Those Above by more than two to one
- The average room count of Those Above was 169, compared to 95 for Those Below.
- The average age of the two groups was nearly equally at approximately 20 years.
Now, the obvious distinction between the two groups will be chain scale, as it's logical that the higher-end chain scales will be more likely to fall the Above category. The chain-scale distributions for the two groups are as follows:
Those Below
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Those Above
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As expected, Those Below primarily consisted of the economy and midscale chains, while Those Above trended toward the upscale and luxury chains. Interesting tidbit: there were actually five luxury-designated properties that fell in Those Below. Ouch.
The age distribution of the properties in both samples was, interestingly, very close, as shown below.
Those Below
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Those Above
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The locational diversity between the groups showed that those properties who achieved higher RevPARs were more likely to be in an urban location, while being located in a small town or off an interstate was more often associated with a below-average RevPAR.
Those Below
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Those Above
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Finally, the geographic diversity between the two groups diverged somewhat as well. Those properties achieving a below-average RevPAR were most heavily located in the South Atlantic, East North Central and West South Central regions, while the RevPAR leaders had strongest representation in the South Atlantic, Pacific and Middle Atlantic regions.
Those Below
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Those Above
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Is there a factoid you want to know about? E-mail me (cwilson@STRanalytics.com) with your research request and check future blogs to see what I found out.
