Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from Ryan Meliker – Morgan Stanley.
Ryan Meliker – Morgan Stanley
A couple of really quick questions here for you. I'm wondering if you can provide color on two different things for me? First of all, some of the other hotel retails out there have talked about the idea that we need to see occupancy growth of X percent before we see any type of pricing power return to the hotels.
I'm wondering if you have an idea of where you see – I know it's not going to be specific to your properties, but maybe market level occupancy, where that needs to be or how much that needs to come back before prices start to turn positive.
And then the second question was you mentioned September was the first month where year-over-year group bookings were positive. I'm wondering if you can give us any color on where those rates are coming in? Are we talking down 5%, down 15%, up 5% on those year-over-year group bookings that are occurring today?
Michael Barnello
As far the color on the occupancy it's a valid point. We look at the industry overall. Most folks are expecting that the industry is going to end up with about a 55% occupancy, which is down dramatically when compared to the last 20 years. The worst occupancies have been in the 59% range. So the comment that we need to regain occupancy before we get pricing power, in general, makes senses.
However, it's too simplistic to apply any kind of simple number to either market or a comp set so that we have a simple number to figure out what's going to happen in our markets before we can raise rates. But it is fair to say that we do have to regain occupancy which will come through increased demand before it can do that.
And it really has to do with a number of things. It has to do with where the day of the week compression is coming because if you do look at what's happened, we have seen significant fall off in midweek business and we need to get that back. So that's going to through also different channels. We're picking up in the leisure, the SMERF, association, government channels, but we really need to get that high end retail and the business traveler back before we can start charging more on the rate side.
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