Nottingham hotels enjoy bumper year
Sporting events brought an upturn to Nottingham’s hotel market over the last year, however trading growth is set to stall due to slower economic growth and tougher market conditions, according to research by PwC.
The Hotel Forecast 2020 analyses market conditions for hotels over the next 12 months predicts dips in performance across all UK hotels, aside from marginal growth in London.
Sporting events have had a positive effect on London and several regional destinations this summer. While one-off cricket world cup related demand helped to slow regional declines in the summer, however it wasn’t enough to balance an overall decline in the regional business market and stop a fall in RevPAR for the second consecutive quarter of 2019.
Cities benefiting from the cricket included Nottingham with Trent Bridge hosting matches in May and June and Nottingham enjoyed a 13.5% boost to RevPAR in the month of June and +4% lift to the city’s half year performance.
Whilst Nottingham saw an increase in visitors, the city saw the largest drop in the number of rooms available of all UK cities with 1.5% less rooms available than 12 months ago and total occupancy levels increased by 0.9%.
The report shows that in terms of the key performance measurement metric, RevPAR, Nottingham has seen one of the greatest increases of 4%, behind only London and Southampton. The average RevPAR across the UK regions fell by 1.8%.
Paul Norbury, office senior partner for PwC in the East Midlands, said: “Whilst the political and economic uncertainty is impacting business confidence and in turn the UK’s hotel market, local economies can benefit from key events and attractions as we have seen in the East Midlands last year. As the region continues to be a sporting and tourism destination we hope this will help the hotel sector during challenging head winds.
“However, the challenge is to turn disruption into opportunity. Digital transformation continues to be an important focus, and it will be critical for companies to manage rapidly evolving guest expectations and the increased digitisation of hotel services, while retaining loyal visitors.”
