RevPAR Up 4.6% Nationally. Your Hotel Probably Wasn't Average. Check Your Comp Set.
The mid-February national numbers look healthy at $103.35 RevPAR, but the spread between the best and worst performing markets was nearly 50 percentage points. If you're benchmarking against the national average instead of your three-mile radius, you're not managing... you're guessing.
A revenue manager I worked with years ago used to keep two printouts taped to her monitor. One was the national STR data. The other was her comp set. When anyone from corporate called to talk about "industry trends," she'd point to the national number, nod politely, then go back to working the comp set. She told me once... "The national number tells me what season it is. My comp set tells me whether I'm winning."
That's the lens you need for the mid-February data. Nationally, occupancy hit 61.5%, ADR came in at $167.98, and RevPAR landed at $103.35... all up year-over-year. Looks great on a slide. But here's where it gets real. Los Angeles posted a 26.5% RevPAR jump (NBA All-Star Game). San Diego surged 20.2%. Meanwhile, New Orleans... which had the Super Bowl the prior year... dropped 23.3% in RevPAR. Orlando fell 10% in occupancy. Same week. Same country. Completely different realities. If you're a GM in New Orleans looking at a headline that says "U.S. hotels up 4.6%," that number is worse than useless. It's misleading.
This is the part that never makes the press release. Event-driven markets are volatile by nature. The week you have the All-Star Game or a massive convention, your numbers look like genius. The following year, when that event is in another city, you're comping against a number you were never going to hit again. Smart operators know this. They built it into their forecasts months ago. But owners who manage by headline... and I've worked for a few... see the year-over-year decline and start asking uncomfortable questions. If you're in a market that benefited from a major event last year and you haven't already reframed expectations with your ownership, you're late.
And then there's the trend underneath the trend. Look at the week ending February 28... just two weeks later. Nationally, ADR and RevPAR both turned negative year-over-year, down 0.2%. Occupancy was flat. The positive story from mid-February evaporated in fourteen days. That's not a catastrophe. It's a reminder that weekly data is noisy, event-driven, and dangerous to build a narrative around. The operators who win aren't the ones reacting to every weekly report. They're the ones who understand their demand calendar at the micro level... what's coming in, what's falling off, what their comp set is pricing, and what their actual cost-to-achieve looks like against the rate they're holding.
Here's what I keep coming back to. The gap between the best and worst markets in any given week is enormous. $167.98 national ADR means nothing to the GM in a secondary market running a $109 ADR and watching labor costs climb. It means nothing to the GM in Los Angeles who just rode a one-time event to a $225 ADR and now has to figure out what normal looks like next week. The number that matters is YOUR number, in YOUR market, against YOUR comp set, measured against YOUR cost structure. Everything else is noise. Useful noise, maybe... context noise. But still noise.
This is what I call the National Number Trap. The 4.6% RevPAR gain is real, but it's an average across markets that are performing 50 points apart from each other. If you're a GM at a 150-key select-service, pull your STR report for the last four weeks... not the national summary, your actual comp set. Compare your RevPAR index, not your RevPAR. If you're indexing above 100, you're winning regardless of what the national number says. If you're below 100 and your ADR is flat while your comp set is pushing rate, you have a pricing problem that no amount of good national news is going to fix. And if you're in a market that comps against a major event from last year, get ahead of it now... put together a one-page brief for your owner or asset manager showing the adjusted baseline, what realistic performance looks like absent the event, and what you're doing to close the gap. Don't wait for them to see the year-over-year decline and call you. Be the one who brings it up first, with a plan already formed.