U.S. hotel owners are bracing for another quarter of sluggish business travel, hoping that this year’s surge in leisure travel can carry over into the fall and holiday season.
Overall, the strength of leisure travel looks unlikely to offset the falloff in corporate business and group travel this year. Hotel data and analytics firm STR is projecting that about 1 billion U.S. hotel rooms will be booked this year, up from 829 million in 2020, but still below the record year of 2019, when guests booked 1.3 billion rooms.
