Booking Holdings Says Leisure Hotels Are Able to Hold Rates Without Having to Offer Deep Discounts
Photo Credit: A jetty for guest arrivals at the Baros Maldives, a luxury property in the Baros resort island in the Maldives that reopens October 1, 2020. Baros Maldives
Skift Take
A hotel price war hasn't materialized as some dreaded. Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel sees an opportunity to prove the value of his brands as a source of demand for hotels and managers of alternative accommodations.
When the pandemic first struck, some observers worried that hotels would engage in deep discounting to try to fill occupancies. But new data from travel conglomerate Booking Holdings suggests that hotels have held the line on average daily rates generally speaking despite the large number of vacancies.
"For newly booked room nights, ADRs [average daily rates] are in total only off a couple of points, even though there's a big shift in that toward domestic travel," said David Goulden, Booking's executive vice president and chief financial officer.
One factor is that countries that often have a lot of outbound travel shifted some spending domestically, enabling some domestic hotels to keep some pricing power, said Booking Holdings executives on a second-quarter earnings call on Thursday.
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Booking Holdings tends to focus on leisure travel, so business hotels, which saw more seve
