Advance hotel reservations for Art Basel Miami Beach last week stood slightly ahead of reservations at the same time last year and were expected to rise, indicating a strong finish to the year in Miami-Dade’s hotel industry.
Advance bookings are the number of hotel rooms reserved to date and a key indicator for future performance. As of last week, advance reservations for Dec. 3 through 6 were at 60.3% occupancy, pacing up 0.8% from a year ago. These numbers are subject to change leading up to Art Basel.
“Art Week looks bright,” said David Whitaker, president and CEO of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We’ve had a couple of rough months in the last couple of months with the slowing of the economy … but we’re ending the year strong, and we seem to be pacing well to begin the year strong.”
CoStar, a global provider of real estate data, analytics and news, and Tourism Economics, an Oxford company, further downgraded performance projections in this year’s final U.S. hotel forecast revision on Nov. 12. Occupancy was lowered 0.2 percentage points to 62.3%, while average daily rate (ADR) was maintained at up 0.8% for the year. Revenue per available room (RevPAR) was downgraded 0.3 points to a 0.4% decline.
From the week of Nov. 9 to 15, Miami-Dade had the second-highest occupancy among the top 25 hotel markets in the nation at 78%. New York had the highest occupancy that week at 88.7%.
“I’m encouraged that we’re bucking that trend in terms of the month ahead and the year ahead,” Mr. Whitaker said. “That said, this is a national phenomenon for a variety of reasons… Almost every city in the United States is down, and down huge.”
Advance hotel reservations in Miami-Dade for December as of last week are pacing up 1.3%. Another report from last week shows the month over comparable month prior-year pace increasing in all but one month for 2026. The number of advance hotel reservations for next year will continue to grow each week.
Several factors impact hotel performance. Organizing new events is one way to drive those numbers up. The FIFA World Cup and the Adobe Max creativity conference are coming to Miami next year.
“Sometimes when you make these month-over-month, week-over-week comparisons you have to remember what happened last year that’s not happening this year,” Mr. Whitaker said. “What we have to do is replace those events with other events and sometimes we trade off. Sometimes it’s an event-driven performance, sometimes it’s just leisure travelers, families, individuals, hotels adjusting their rates.”
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