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?

GUWonder

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.

gaobest

More people think that the points game is worth pursuing so many of these stays could be points. Or they’re just rich and enjoying their vacations.

Error 601

As hotel prices have increased I have known a lot more people to be either willing to wait till the last minute to book or book through Priceline or Hotwire and personally there has only been a single instance when I couldn't figure out what hotel I was blindly booking ahead of time but there weren't really any bad alternatives in that area.

KRSW

I'm based in Florida and from what I've seen around here, many of the people who are spending money like this truly can't afford it. They have no savings whatsoever. There are multiple threads on Disboards.com about selling your plasma to take your family to Disney.

It's amazing what people do out of pride/vanity these days. Disney's $6,000 for two nights hotel & Disney's $5,000 cocktail are outgrowths of this.

travelinmanS

I’ve noticed quite a few places in Hawaii and Napa that were $4-500/night before Covid now asking $1000+.

I simply don’t even look at them twice. I was happy to be able to stay at some great places using points or sometimes splurging, but no bed is worth a grand a night anywhere in the world to me.

aroundtheworld76

I've only seen about a 15-20% increase in hotel rates over the last year. At least for the random cities we end up in. I could probably get Concur to produce a more exact figure. The places that had expensive hotels before covid have expensive hotels again. BOS, MCO and HNL being the worst. Haven't seen any 1k/night rates though.

DELee

Most expensivist for NYC tomorrow (01/16/23):

And that's pre-tax.

David

aroundtheworld76

Manhattan has always been an outlier for hotel rates. That said, most hotels same date, same place are nowhere near 1k

DELee

Not just Manhattan:

And, yes, quite often there are cheaper hotels. But there are plenty of expensive cheaper hotels - as well as these that are past the magical $1K/night.

​​​​​​​David

CPRich

Don't book a room at 8pm the night you need to stay. 1 week out:



It's easy to find high prices. But the plural of anecdote is not data. The middle of Indiana on a weekend way out in the future:


I prefer data

Adelphos

Your data is a bit old (and average include $50 motels and $2,500 ski resorts)

aroundtheworld76

Sage advice for most folks, but I am quite often booking at 8pm the night I need to stay. At least 75% of my stays are booked booked day of. I generally agree that data > anecdote, but with hotel costs and utilization varying so much, it's difficult to apply data broadly.

Of my 240 hotel nights in 2022, the most expensive was $597 ( a HH property in BOS).

While hotels are more expensive and folks have shown they can find 1k/night rooms, they are not common enough for at least this biz traveler to seriously worry about and certainly not enough to consider them as defining an "era."
Obviously YMMV.

mball

California and NYC especially free pretty insane.

And, yeah, Napa... I do not get it. I grew up in Southern California but had extended family in the North Bay / Napa. There's no way my parents would be paying those prices today. Mind you, we weren't even staying at 'resorts', except 1 or 2 special occasions, but I can't fathom paying $500 night for an Embassy Suites!

I am sure there are many factors...it's probably profit motives, some folks over spending, and to certain segment high prices are synonymous with 'luxury' and 'status', regardless of the actual place. In some markets, it seems like the 'dual income no kids' group definitely plays a role. I am kind of there... I'm not spending $1K/night (hell no! that's what points are for. ) but there's certainly travel that I can take while I don't have kids.

Much of my travel is personal, but there is a slight bit of concern to these trends for business travel, which for me is not glamorous as it's University funded. I'm headed to Toronto in a couple of months and it's hard to find reasonable rooms just due to events...to an extent that's always been the case, but prices do feel higher. Guess there's just lots of pent up demand everywhere, still!

​​​
Funny, I frequently find myself booking fully flexible rooms just in case when something might come up and cancelling them. I wouldn't do this if I didn't have access to corp codes which definitely make the practice feel reasonable. All the said, if you do have a corporate code, it feels like booking day of probably isn't so bad. I've had my successes there, too!

aroundtheworld76

We have to book through Concur. I can usually beat Concur prices using the Hilton/Marriott apps, sometimes by $100+ dollars. I've sent screenshots of the difference to my boss, but still gotta book through concur. Oh well, more points for me.