. |
Industry enters 20th month of recession:
EDITOR'S NOTE
| July 6th, 2009 |
| e-forecasting.com eNews for the Hotel Industry |
DURHAM, New Hampshire —
Economic research firm e-forecasting.com, in conjunction with Smith
Travel Research, announced HIP edged down 0.7 percent in June,
following a decline of 1.2 percent in May. HIP, the Hotel
Industry’s Pulse index, is a composite indicator that gauges
business activity in the U.S. hotel industry in real-time. The
latest decrease brought the index to a reading of 82.5. The index
was set to equal 100 in 2000.
Looking at HIP’s six-month
growth rate, which historically has signaled turning points in U.S.
hotel business activity, HIP declined by an annual rate of 19.2
percent in June, following a decline of 20.7 percent in May. This
compares to a long-term annual growth rate of 3.2 percent, the same
as the 38-year average annual growth rate of the industry’s gross
domestic product.
 |
"This recession continues to drag
out, just one month shy of matching the longest one the
industry felt back in May ’81 to January ’83, which lasted
21 months,” said Maria Simos, CEO of e-forecasting.com. “At
the 20-month mark, this has been a long, drawn-out decline;
yet with this reading, we see a continuance of some recovery
in the index. The six-month growth rate continues to
improve. Even though the industry is still suffering, we’re
on the long path to recovery.”
The Hotel Industry
Pulse, or HIP for short, is a hotel industry indicator which
was created to fill the void of a real-time monthly
indicator for the hotel industry that captures current
conditions. The indicator provides useful information about
the timing and degree of the industry’s linking with the
U.S. business cycle for the past 40 years. It tracks monthly
overall business conditions in the industry, like an
industry GDP, and points in a timely way to the changes in
direction from growth to recession or vice versa. The
composite indicator is made with the following components:
revenues from consumers staying at hotels and motels
adjusted for inflation, room occupancy rate and hotel
employment, along with other key economic factors which
influence hotel business activity.
|
