Horwath HTL Sentiment Survey: Australian Hotel Industry and the impact of COVID-19

This sentiment survey was conducted by Horwath HTL Singapore, in partnership with AHS Advisory, to gauge the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hotels across Australia. Hotel owners and operators in Australia are currently looking at an empty horizon, uncertain when the first signs of a resumption of business and leisure travel will come into view.

While nobody knows the answer to this, we believe that the collective thoughts of the industry can provide some guidance over the coming weeks and months as we all seek to understand the scale of the situation.

Key findings of the report include:

• The majority of hotels in the survey (67%) are planning to remain open. This is a higher ratio than had initially been expected heading into the survey. A greater proportion of Hotels located in Regional markets (69%) are planning to stay open compared to their State Capital counterparts (65%) despite the fact that a greater proportion of participating Regional hotels have already closed.
• The majority of survey participants expect the impact of COVID-19 to be long-term, thus, occupancy performance is expected to start rebounding only in Q4 2020. There is no noticeable difference in the trend of occupancy expectations among properties, regardless of location, although hotels in Melbourne expect Q3 2020 to record lower performance than Q2 2020. This could be due to the looming amount of new supply to enter the market.
• Unsurprisingly, domestic-sourced demand segments are expected to recover faster, since there is more uncertainty surrounding the return of international travel. This strongly aligns with Australia being a predominant domestic hotel market.

About Horwath HTL

Horwath HTL is the world”s largest hospitality consulting brand with 45 offices across the world providing expert local knowledge. Since 1915 we have been providing impartial, specialist advice to our clients and are recognized as the founders of the Uniform System of Accounts which subsequently has become the industry standard for hospitality accounting. We focus one hundred percent on hotels, tourism and leisure consulting and have successfully completed over 16,000 projects.  If you have any questions, please contact James Chappell, Global Business Director at [email protected]^[1].