Coronavirus drives down occupancy at Heathrow hotels

A drop in hotel occupancy levels at Heathrow Airport at the end of January has been blamed on the outbreak of coronavirus.

Hospitality benchmarking company STR said that “an impact was visible in the final days of the month in the Heathrow Airport submarket” with an occupancy rate of 57.6% recorded on 31 January, down 22.2% compared to the same day in 2019.

The wider London market did not appear to experience a noticeable impact on performance as a result of the virus, which so far has seen nine cases diagnosed in the UK, according to STR’s preliminary data for January.

However, occupancy was marginally down across the capital by 0.9% to 71.3%, primarily due to a 2.3% increase in supply of rooms while demand rose by 1.4%.

Average daily rate and revenue per available room (revpar) year on year increased by 1.5% to £133.31 and by 0.6% to £95.10 respectively.

STR will release the full performance results for London hotels later this month.