EDITOR'S COMMENT
• During the worst of the pandemic, the US extended stay sector had clear and obvious advantages over the wider hotel market which resulted in it massively outperforming its peers.
The need to accommodate health, infrastructure and construction workers meant that many extended stay hotels traded right through, often at healthy occupancies. But as life slowly returns to normality, the sector is still considerably outperforming the wider industry.
The clearest trend to emerge is the bottom-up recovery - the performance graphs for economy extended stay show very steep rises, and the climb is less pronounced the higher up the price points you go.
Perhaps the most astonishing figure to emerge from the latest Highland Group report is that demand for extended stay product in September this year reached 12.93 million room nights - nine per cent higher than in the distant pre-pandemic days of September 2019.
The sector's golden sheen is not a flash in the pan, and the success story has many more chapters to be written.
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