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?