China: Hotel Market and Covid-19 Impact

China: Hotel Market Sentiment Survey

The outbreak of the Covid-19 in early 2020 caused domestic hotel performance to experience a precipitous decline, but as the domestic conditions stabilized and the vaccination rate against coronavirus increased significantly, the impact of the pandemic is steadily diminishing, confidence in the domestic hotel market is gradually restored, and the dawn of hotel performance is also ushering in, casting out the gloomy mist.

Following the five consecutive surveys on the Influence of the Coronavirus Outbreak in February, June, September, December 2020 and March 2021, Horwath HTL conducted the sixth follow-up survey on the market in July 2021, hoping to provide an in-depth analysis of the current recovery of the hotel market and to understand the industry’s expectations for the third quarter of 2021 in terms of occupancy, ADR, and total revenue. In order to better analyze and compare the hotel market of various regions and cities in China, we utilized a specific sentiment model to quantify the respondents’ feedback and presented it with index, so as to more visually reflect the respondents‘ expectations for the hotel market.

The sentiment index presented in the hotel market outlook section of this survey reflects the market’s expectations for overall performance. The index ranges from -150 to +150, with “-150” indicating that the market is extremely pessimistic about expected performance, “0” indicating a neutral attitude, and “+150 ” indicates that the market’s expectations are highly optimistic. In this survey, given that the data for 2020 is not referential, each hotel surveyed uses the actual performance in the third quarter of 2019 as a benchmark for comparing the expected market performance in 2021, and provides an outlook on how well various demand segments would recover in the future.

The conclusions covered by this survey are intended to assist hoteliers to fully understand the industry dynamics, adjust their business strategies in a timely manner and achieve normalized and healthy operations more quickly.

This report summarizes the research results of this special survey, which received 539 valid response from 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across China. We would like to sincerely thank the participants for sharing their industry insights.