The hotel business is all about occupancies. That’s one of the reasons booking aggregators like Agoda and Booking.com exist. Airlines will schedule flights according to demand, so the cheapest seats are those sold earliest. But hotels will discount rooms at the last minute if they are in danger of not making room occupancy targets in order to generate as much revenue as possible, until midnight on any given day.

That is why there have been such great deals for travellers during the Covid crisis. Property owners have been willing to release inventory for considerably less than they would have two years ago, just to survive. This is brutally evident in City Lodge’s occupancies...

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