Travelmole has a news-report on a survey conducted by ” Travelocity to take a closer look at how much travelers paid for their summer vacations. Using hotel data of trips consumed by customers in July 2008 compared to those in July 2007, Travelocity was able to identify 14 major US cities where the price difference of a vacation that included a fight (sic) and five night stay in a hotel was actually less than a $50 increase compared to last year’s prices. Travelocity’s editor at large noted that “the mistake many travelers make is that ending their vacation search based on that alone. Hotel pricing in many cities has stayed relatively flat compared to 2007. The hotel stay is typically the most expensive part of any vacation, so steady, an in some cases, decreasing prices means that skipping the vacation this year may not be necessary”.
The article also states that “Fourteen popular cities with less than a $50 price difference include Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Orlando, San Diego and San Francisco and others”.
In essence, the report indicates that while airline prices may have gone up, hotels have obliged with price breaks to make the overall cost of summer travel about the same as it was last year. That may have been good news for the traveler but only goes to underscore pricing pressure on the hospitality industry. Unsurprisingly, New York City was not in the list of cities as hotel prices measured by Revpar has actually gone up although Hotwire ranked the Big Apple #3 as a hot labor day destination with a rate of $129 (no mention of the hotels’ names).