PHILIP WOOLLER

Senior director for the Middle East and Africa

STR

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philipwooller

Real-time data

The main driver of the business is the strength and depth of the hospitality data that we collect. More than 75,000 hotels worldwide provide their performance data to STR; in turn, we provide premium benchmarking, analytics and insights from across the globe. It is a vital lifeline for the entire hotel and travel industry – real-time data and analytics that allow our clients to manage their businesses effectively and strategically.

Dubai: the benchmark

One of the greatest highlights of 2022 has been the success of Dubai. It all began with Dubai Expo in October 2021, a global event that was visited by millions. It was organized in an extraordinary way, and there was enormous demand in the emirate for hotels, restaurants and other hospitalityrelated services. Indeed, occupancy rates were as strong as they have ever been, and ADR went into overdrive. This upward trend continued throughout 2022, culminating in Dubai being recognized as the most successful city in terms of hotel performance over the past few years.

Recessions on the horizon?

We’ve known for a while that economic headwinds presented significant downside risks to our industry and the world’s wider macroeconomic recovery. We expect the pace of demand recovery to slow over Q4 2022 and Q1 2023. We released downgraded baselines for the U.S. and Eurozone, suggesting that recessions are the new baseline for 2023.

The downgrade isn’t entirely unexpected, however, since high inflation and rising interest rates, slowing global growth, the war in Ukraine and China maintaining its Covid-zero policy are all adding fuel to the fire. The good news is that the Middle East stands out as economically strong relative to the rest of the world; the not-so-good news is that the Middle East, to a large extent, needs the rest of the world to travel, and that could be challenging.