The Chattanooga hotel market was the most occupied in the country in the week following devastating Easter Sunday tornadoes that displaced thousands of people and brought thousands more into town to help with recovery.
“We track this data globally, and because of that impact, you were [an] occupancy leader globally,” said Jan Freitag, senior vice president with hospitality benchmarking company STR.
In the week ending April 19, Hamilton County’s roughly 10,000 hotel rooms were about 60% occupied, making this market the third-most occupied in the world behind only Guam and Singapore, according to STR data. That doesn’t mean, however, that local room occupancy was high in the context of a normal economy, Freitag added.
“It was really low, but it was really high,” he said.
March and April are normally busy months for visitors to the Chattanooga area, with about 70% of Hamilton County’s hotel rooms booked in a typical March or April. The coronavirus crisis has devastated the hotel industry globally. In Chattanooga in April, room occupancy was down more than 36% from the same month in 2019. In March, it was down nearly 35%.