“Numerology” tries to find reality within various measurements of economic and real estate trends.California’s hottest hotel market, when it comes to the growing demand for rooms, is much-maligned San Francisco.My trusty spreadsheet reviewed hotel performance data for 45 counties for 2023’s first six months, distributed by Visit California.San Francisco County, the state’s fourth-largest hotel market, had demand for 3.9 million room nights in the first half, up 14.
This seems to be part of a big-city tourism revival. The state’s biggest hotel market, Los Angeles County, also had a big jump in demand. Hotel customers are returning to California’s metropolitan hubs because of increased office work and more corporate travel. Restrictions on inbound foreign travel ended and big cities are popular with international visitors. Plus, a pandemic push to vacation away from crowded urban settings has slowed.
That demand helped fill 69% of the top 10’s rooms – a 2 percentage-point improvement in a year. Occupancy ran just 61.5% in the other 35 counties, off 2.7 points in the 12 months.Those trends allowed owners in these 10 markets to push room rates up 6.2% to $193 a night vs. a 1.1% gain to $172 in the other 35 counties.California’s 68 million hotel nights sold was up 1.7% in a year vs. 634 million nationwide, up 2.6%. But California hotels were 67% full vs. 63% occupancy across the U.S.