Originally Posted by
Adelphos
I’ve done a lot of traveling the last few months… one thing I notice when I go to these high priced resorts and urban hotels is… how full they are, and how wide the demographics seem to range (young, old, couples, big families, etc).
When did so many people get the income to the point they can book hotels at these prices?
The increased move to multigenerational living is a part of the picture for this “splurging”. More earning people sharing housing and housing costs lead to more money for discretionary spending per earner. And if they travel together, they can split hotel costs sort of the same way too.
Also, many people with relatively high incomes going into the pandemic seem to be of the mindset that what they didn’t spend between late 2019 and late 2020 they could spend in 2021 and since on top of what they normally would spend.
There is also still a big net worth effect spending that has driven these rates as a lot of people had such big increases in net worth during the pandemic that they feel like they can spend it now even as the asset bubbles get pricked by rising interest rates.
And if a person is stuck with not being able or willing to splurge on buying housing (due to high interest rates), then the money may go into more discretionary spending such as travel.
And a big one is that all this ability to engage in remote work has made vacation periods play out differently with leisure travel demand than used to be the case and peak has become more peak when it comes to upper scale leisure travel demand.