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Weak Q1 2019 for Asia Pacific Hotels Reported

Hotels in different regions of the world keep posting their results for the first quarter of this year. It allows understanding the first trends of 2019 and making forecasts for the rest of the year. While many regions like Europe report positive results, hotels in the Asia Pacific definitely have some struggles at the start of the year. Certain destinations like hotels in Phuket experienced real problems like the lowest occupancy since the first quarter of 2015.

First, let’s look at the overall performance of the region. Here, the hospitality industry of Asia Pacific posted negative results in all the three key metrics. The year-on-year (Q1 2019 vs. Q1 2018) performance results are the following: occupancy fell by 1.3% to the level of 67.4%, and the average daily rate lost 0.9% to US$103.63. With decreases in occupancy and average daily rate, there wasn’t a chance for RevPAR (revenue per available room) to stay positive, so this metric is also negative – a decline of 2.2% to the level of US$69.81.

Hotels in Bali, Indonesia, had a relatively strong start of the year. Even though the occupancy remained almost flat (+0.1% to 60.6% in total), significant growth in the average daily rate of 14.3% to IDR1,439,349.34 couldn’t stay unnoticed. RevPAR grew by almost the same amount of +14.4% to IDR871,828.26.

However, there is a reason for this strong performance of Bali hotels in Q1 2019 – rather weak performance of the region in Q1 2018. At that time, the popularity of the tropical island was weakened by the eruption of the Mount Agung. As the Bureau of Statistics in Bali mentions, the destination welcomed more than 890,000 international guests during the first two months of 2019.

Unfortunately, hotels in Phuket couldn’t post the same positive results. They had the lowest occupancy since Q1 2015 instead – in Q1 2019, the occupancy fell by 7.0% to 84.5% in total. The average daily rate fell by 5.7% to THB5,098.74, and RevPAR featured even a bigger decline of 12.3% to THB4,310.34. What could trigger these results? Experts name several reasons, with the lack of tourists from mainland China being one of the most important. General elections in March also didn’t boost domestic tourism, making people stay where they live. The destination may perform better in Q2, however, as Thai New Year is traditionally a hot season for the hospitality industry of the country.

10.05.2019

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