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Robin Rossmann
Managing Director, CoStar Group Europe
Robin Rossmann is the Managing Director of CoStar Group Europe, a position he has held since July 2024.1 He leads CoStar's European operations, responsible for growing CoStar, LoopNet, and Homes.com across Europe, including leadership of Sales, Research, and Customer Service functions.12
Prior to his current role, Rossmann was the Managing Director at STR, a CoStar Group Company, from January 2016 to July 2024.13 During his time at STR, he led the company's business across EMEA, APAC, and LATAM regions, focusing on improving the provision of data to hotel industry stakeholders.3
Before joining STR, Rossmann spent 13 years at Deloitte, where he was a Senior Director in the Global Hospitality Advisory Team in London.12 His work at Deloitte involved supporting clients on various aspects of the hospitality industry, including growth strategy, business planning, and financial advisory.2
Rossmann is a native of South Africa and holds qualifications from Stellenbosch University and the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants.14 He is based in London and has been instrumental in expanding CoStar's global footprint in the real estate information and analytics sector.24
Highlights
18 months after the end of lockdowns for most, we've hit a new norm for demand across the days-of-the week and whilst not drastically different to pre-COVID, there certainly are changes.
To bring it to life, we've compared occupancy by day, indexed to 2019 levels, for the UK and the US. UK is slightly better performing, but the trend is the same. The reality of more people being in-office Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday than on Monday and Friday is impacting demand as follows:
- Monday's are the least recovered - no surprises - less people in the office, less need to travel to see them until Tuesday morning. I personally think this is not only bad for the hospitality sector, but for the productivity of those businesses too - you may disagree, but that's my view.
- Tuesday and Wednesday - Better than Monday but not fully recovered yet, however business travel is still recovering so expect this to return pre-COVID levels in time.
- Thursday - This is where it gets really interesting - For pure business demand, Thursday should be just as bad as Monday, probably worse because there are even less people in the office on a Friday. As an example, post COVID I have tried to, but have not managed to extended a single business trip to see clients beyond Thursday because unfortunately they've all been working from home on Friday . However... Thursday is the most recovered weekday... why, because of the boost in leisure demand post pandemic. Some of this is pent-up demand, that will recede... however some of it is due to growth in Bleisure (or my preferred term, mullet) travel.
- Friday, Saturday and Sunday are the best performing days - again due to the leisure travel boom.
One other caveat is the UK hotel industry is benefiting from selling rooms to the government for migrants/refugees. We estimate that as taking up 5% of supply, all-week-round, that is one of the things underpinning the stronger performance of the UK vs. US.
#CoStar #hotels #str
It's remarkable the vast range of performance post COVID at a country level. Here you have the top 20 countries by hotel room supply (how many of you would have guessed all 20 correctly?) and their June YTD RevPAR indexed to 2019.
One big caveat.... this is in USD - so dollar strength is punishing many countries on this metric.... that being said, using USD does help to mitigate the inflation boosting some of these countries (e.g. local/constant currency would see Turkey in first place indexing at 535 and Brazil in 2nd at 149)
Some observations... Even though it's USD, the US is sitting in 12th place. I don't think many would have guessed that. The underlying reason is that for many countries ahead in the leaderboard, it's the outward bound US traveler that's underpinned their success.... and that demand has not yet been replaced by inbound tourism to the US... because of the strong dollar.
Mexico, Italy, France, Greece and the UK are all saying a big "Thank you" to the American Tourist.
Another note on the UK, rooms being occupied by migrant/refugees now account for, we estimate, 5% of all hotel rooms sold which is lifting country level performance.
At the bottom end of the table, or as I like to think of it, best opportunities for good value travel (and biggest opportunity for growth going forward)... Germany has continued to struggle with depressed domestic demand and missing inbound international demand. Japan is second last is a underpinned by later re-opening of international boarders a yen weakness (I visited in March and it was much better value as a tourist than is perceived). China has the greatest opportunity for future growth - if you need the reasons, check the headlines on the economy and look at how international flight capacity is still way below pre-COVID peaks.
What did I miss?
#costar #hospitality #benchmarking
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