New Hotel Occupancy Data Signals Positive Year to Come

Posted February 22, 2022 in Research, Tourism Marketing

2021 is now behind us and looking at the hotel data below we can compare how it fared against 2020 and previous years as well. Though this data focuses specifically on overnight hotel stays, it still gives us a good indicator of how visitation into our region is moving and shows that we are inching closer to 2019 numbers (in fact, Durham’s Occupancy in December 2021 surpassed December 2019 by 1.3%). This is a good sign and should hopefully continue into 2022.

Overall, 2021 occupancy in RTO6 increased by 15.4% from 2020, but is still 19% lower than 2019 occupancy rates (Occupancy 2021: 55.1%, 2020: 39.7%, 2019: 74.1%), and revenue in 2021 was 51.3% higher than 2020 but 34.4% lower than 2019 (Revenue 2021: $185.4M, 2020: $122.5M, 2019: $283.7M).

Below is the hotel data aggregated for RTO6 from 2017-2021, as well as hotel data specifically for York and Durham Regions 2019-2021 (unfortunately, hotel data for Headwaters is not available).

As we strive towards pre-COVID visitation numbers in the region, it is useful to look at trends in 2021 and compare them to 2019. In terms of occupancies in RTO6 for 2021 vs 2019, in August we started seeing differences of only 10%, and that trend continued into December (actually, December 2021 was only 3.8% lower than December 2019!). Revenue started to see the same trend in the fall with differences between 2021 and 2019 in the single digits (9.1% difference in October 2021: $23.1M vs October 2019: $25.5M). Finishing December 2021 with only 2.1% lower revenue than December 2019 (December 2021: $17.1M vs December 2019: $17.6M). Granted that December is not a high hotel month, it shows us a positive trend to give us hope and was only 0.7% lower than the average December revenue.

In 2022, we will continue to collect various research to help our stakeholders tell Tourism’s story in RTO6. If you have any research requests, geo-fencing needs or questions, please do not hesitate in contacting Tom at Tguerquin@CentralCounties.ca