The city’s average hotel room rate in June was $335.74.
Metro Vancouver in June continued to have the priciest and most occupied hotel rooms among major Canadian centres.
New data from CoStar, a global provider of real estate data, analytics and news, holds that Metro Vancouver hotel rooms in June were occupied an average 86.9 per cent of the time. That is up from the city’s 83.8 per cent occupancy rate last June, which was also the highest among major Canadian centres.
Metro Vancouver’s high occupancy rate in June compares with Calgary’s 85.5 per cent rate, Toronto’s 83 per cent rate and Ottawa’s 77.6 per cent rate.
Other centres’ average occupancy rate were below that, with Montreal notching a 73.5 per cent occupancy rate and Edmonton coming in with rooms only occupied an average 63.7 per cent of the time.
High occupancy means more scarcity, giving hotel owners more leeway to raise prices.
Vancouver also topped major Canadian centres with a $335.74 average daily room rate. That bettered average daily room rates for Montreal ($306.47), Toronto ($269.64) and Calgary ($248.77), with other major centres below that.
Year-over-year in June, however, Vancouver’s average room rate was pretty flat, up 0.1 per cent from $335.56 in June 2024, according to CoStar.
CoStar’s national director of hospitality analytics Jan Freitag told BIV that this was “well below the level of inflation” and that steady room rates in Vancouver has been a trend for a while.
“In the first six months of the year, performance growth has been anemic, as occupancy declined slightly by 0.5 per cent and room rates increased marginally, by 0.3 per cent,” he said of Vancouver.
Freitag said that this has led to almost no change in a metric known as revenue per average room per night, or RevPAR as it is known in the industry.
Vancouver’s $291.92 in RevPAR again topped all major Canadian centres, with Montreal ($225.15), Toronto ($223.73), Calgary ($212.65) and other metro areas coming far behind.
Calgary, however, saw the biggest growth in those metrics. Its occupancy was up 12.2 per cent year-over-year in June, while its average daily room rate increased 33.8 per cent and its RevPAR was up a staggering 50.1 per cent, according to CoStar data.
Vancouver has had high hotel room rates and occupancy levels for many years.
The city’s $357.07 average hotel room rate in July 2024 is the highest average room rate for a month out of all major Canadian metro areas, according to CoStar data.
Tourism officials have long bemoaned the city’s lack of hotel infrastructure and have long trotted out the round figure that Vancouver needs another 10,000 hotel rooms to create a balanced market.
Vancouver’s Reliance Properties and Montreal’s Germain Hotels in March launched Vancouver’s latest hotel proposal — one that would see a 12-storey office building at 1111 West Hastings St. get converted into a 180-room boutique hotel.
Reliance Properties CEO Jon Stovell told BIV that redevelopment could be comparatively fast because no rezoning would be needed.
“It would be just [needing] a minor development permit, just for any outside-related work, and a building permit,” he said. “It’s very fast.”
He anticipates construction on the site, at the northwest corner of West Hastings and Thurlow streets, to start next year so Le Germain Hotel Vancouver can open in 2029.
The two companies would each own a 50 per cent stake in the hotel with Germain managing it, Stovell said.
Bonnis Properties in March revealed its latest plan for a new hotel in the city, in the Granville entertainment district, above the Commodore Ballroom.
Many other hotel projects are underway.
