London results for January - a steady start to the year?

At the end of last year, I am sure most of you will remember my excitement associated with the fact that in 2011, The Conference Bench will have more year to year data, and that nearly all of our markets will have this lovely data to use in their analysis. So our London year to year sample has got a lot bigger - from 6 hotels in 2010, to 16 in 2011! So how did January turn out?

RevPAS up by 7.53% to £7.39

RevPOS down by 6.94% to £19.58 

RevPD up by 14.21% to £75.19 

Occupancy up by 15.55% up to 37.74%!

So a nice healthy rise of 7.53% in the RevPAS, which was strongly driven by the increase in Occupancy.

These 16 hotels achieved £4,804,380 in the month compared to £4,468,050 in January 2010. 

Interestingly, although occupancy was up, delegate numbers where down by 5.35% in the month for this sample, which shows that the market yielded the customers nicely. Typically, you would expect the RevPD to track the delegate rise or fall %, however, the 14.21% RevPD increase shows a marked difference to the delegate decrease of 5.35%, indicating strong yielding on a per delegate basis. The parallel example is the RevPOS and Occupancy - ie the rise/fall in one is usually reflected in the other, and that is the case here - Occupancy up by 15.55% and RevPOS down by 6.94%, the difference again indicating strong yielding by the hotels.  

 

We are getting the final month end numbers in for February now from all of our markets, so please watch this space!  How is the next few months looking for all of you? 

A Belated Happy New Year and some 2010 results...

By now I am sure the dust has settled on 2010, the year end result confirmed, and the balance sheets and P+L critiqued to death. How did your conference department perform?  Did it make a good strong healthy contribution to your final balance sheet? And more importantly, did you outperform the market? I thought I would publish the ranking of our conference markets in revenue per available Square meter and occupancy for the year end as an interesting insight into how the markets finished up in 2010. It certainly makes some interesting reading:

RevPAS

1st London           €10.78 

2nd Moscow        €9.34

3rd Oslo               €7.58

4th Doha               €7.31

5th Frankfurt         €6.71

6th Stockholm       €5.86 

7th Abu Dhabi       €5.63 

8th Copenhagen     €5.41 

9th Brussels           €4.42 

10th Dubai             €3.66  

Occupancy

1st Doha               47.46% 

2nd Abu Dhabi     42.86% 

3rd London          42.41% 

4th Dubai             39.84% 

5th Frankfurt        39.69% 

6th  Moscow        39.17% 

7th Oslo               36.47% 

8th Copenhagen   32.44% 

9th Stockholm      27.95% 

10th Brussels        25.12%  

And so now all eyes turn towards 2011 - what will it hold?  It certainly seems to me that the markets are fairly tentative - there is some good business on the books, but some months are dead. However the short lead nature of this business continues to make forecasting incredibly difficult - will that alone save your bad months? 

How is 2011 shaping up for you? Comment Below!