Hotel GOP margins still lag 2019 despite RevPAR growth

RevPAR is up in the U.S. hotel market. So is the top line. And yet, according to the Not Done Weekly piece on Hospitality Net pulling from STR and HotStats, GOP margins are still stuck below 2019 levels. That gap is the story hoteliers should be reading twice.

The line items are familiar. Franchise fees, A&G and SaaS subscriptions are climbing faster than revenue. Every new tool gets sold as efficiency, and in practice it becomes one more monthly cost stacked on top of the reservation engine, the CRM, the revenue management platform, the guest messaging layer, the integrations that glue them all together. Owners are the ones absorbing the downside.

My read: this is where the next round of tech buying decisions gets interesting. The pitch that worked in 2021, more software as a badge of modernity, does not survive a margin conversation with an owner. What survives is software that either moves rate, cuts headcount, or drops a line item out of the P&L. Vendors who cannot answer which of those three they deliver will find themselves in the renewal spreadsheet next to the ones already being cancelled.