Dubai: Describing recent years as a “very challenging period of trading” for hotels in the Middle East, 2018 got off to a strong start, according to the latest worldwide poll of full-service hotels from HotStats published on Monday.
Both the revenue per available room (RevPAR), a key metric for measuring a hotel’s health, and occupancy, for the region’s hotels grew in January.
Whilst hotels in the Middle East and Africa suffered a 3.2 per cent year-on-year decline in achieved average room rate in January, to $182.33, this was more than offset by the 3.3 percentage point increase in room occupancy, to 69.1 per cent.
As a result of the movement in volume and price, RevPAR growth at hotels in the region was recorded at 1.6 per cent for the month, to $125.91, which was 7.7 per cent above the RevPAR average ($116.92) for the region in the rolling 12-months to January 2018.
In addition to the increase in rooms revenue, hotels in the Middle East successfully recorded year-on-year growth in non-rooms revenues, which included an increase in food and beverage (+2.0 per cent), conference and banqueting (+4.9 per cent) and leisure (+5.2 per cent), on a per available room basis.
