Average daily rates across the Marriott International portfolio are almost back to pre-pandemic levels, the hotel group said in its Q3 reporting.
The ADR in the latest business quarter was $155.21, up 30.6 per cent on Q3 2020, and now down only 4.4 per cent compared with the third quarter of 2019.
Worldwide occupancy reached 58.2 per cent, up 23.4 per cent from the same period last year.
The company reported more than $3.9 billion in revenues for the quarter, compared with $2.3 billion one year ago.
"We've been very pleased to see rate almost back at pre-pandemic levels in just 20 months," said Marriott CFO Leeny Oberg. "In comparison, global ADRs have lagged the recovery in RevPAR in prior downturns, taking around five years to rebound after the 2009 recession and around four years to recover post 9/11."
Based on conversations with corporate clients, Marriott expects a recovery in business transient to gradually continue as more workers return to the office, guest visitation policies are relaxed and a greater number of employees are permitted to travel again.
The group also noted that, historically, small and medium-sized companies contributed around 60 per cent of Marriott's business transient revenue, a figure which has grown to 75 per cent during the recovery, said the group.
As a result, some of that SME business has been in more secondary and tertiary markets, said Oberg. "However, during the third quarter, we saw the best improvement in our big cities in special corporate [customers booking negotiated rates] that we've seen since the pandemic. So, it is absolutely moving in the right direction, including those larger cities."
Overall, the group's corporate transient and groups business continued to show improvement, but the former took a bit more of a hit during the third quarter, said CEO Anthony Capuano, partly due to the impact of the delta variant in North America.
"The segment gives us the best indication of business demand trends. Special corporate bookings showed steady recovery each month this year until we saw a slight pullback in the back half of the third quarter," he said.
Capuano added that the segment's upward trajectory returned in October with bookings versus 2019 growing each week during the month, especially for certain verticals. "Accounting and consulting grew 35 per cent over what we saw last month, and technology business grew about 31 per cent versus last month," he said.
Overall, "special corporate bookings are currently down less than 40 per cent compared to the same time frame in 2019."