Hyatt Hotels Had a Great Memorial Day Weekend. The Summer Season Looks Busy Too.

Text size

Hyatt Hotels

kicked off the summer travel season with a bang, becoming the latest travel company to tout a return to business as normal.

Travel trends during the Memorial Day weekend helped produce the strongest revenue per available room, or RevPAR, in any individual month since November 2019, the hotel chain said in an update Monday.

During the Memorial Day weekend, RevPAR in the Americas was approximately 24% above Memorial Day weekend 2019, continuing to emphasize the return of leisure travel, management added.

“Our operational metrics in May serve as further evidence of continued recovery with comparable systemwide RevPAR improving from April, and systemwide RevPAR outside of Asia Pacific actualizing 3% above 2019 levels for the second consecutive month,” said

H

yatt (ticker: H) CEO Mark Hoplamazian. “As we look forward, we anticipate a busy summer travel season ahead.”

Outside of Memorial Day weekend, systemwide RevPAR in May was approximately 6% lower compared with May 2019, or 3% above when excluding operations in the Asia Pacific region. Travel in Asia has taken longer to rebound amid stringent Covid-19 lockdowns across China.

Forward bookings are also robust, Hyatt said, with comparable systemwide transient revenue on the books for June through August on track to be 5% more than the same period in 2019, or 15% excluding Asia Pacific. Short-term demand for group business is also trending above 2019 levels, the company said.

Hyatt Hotels stock was up 1.4% to $93.15 on Monday.

After two years of struggling through a patchwork of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, the current windfall is a welcome one for the travel industry. Recently,

Marriott International

(

MAR

) and

Hilton Worldwide Holdings

(

HLT

) said they were going to resume paying quarterly dividends that had been suspended early in the pandemic. The companies have issued commentary guiding for a busy summer travel season.

But even so, there are some concerns that the enthusiasm over travel may be premature. Marriott’s forward-looking guidance, for instance, was more conservative than expected, with the company seeing RevPAR in North America to be roughly flat relative to 2019 levels for the rest of 2022.

Write to Sabrina Escobar at [email protected]