ATLANTA—The US lodging industry will achieve 65% occupancy in 2015, the highest national occupancy rate since STR, Inc. began reporting data in 1987, according to the September 2014 edition of PKF Hospitality Research's Hotel Horizons. By the end of 2015, PKF-HR—a CBRE company—projects that the demand for lodging accommodations will have increased 25.8% since the depths of the recession in 2009, while the supply of hotel rooms will have grown by just 5.6%.

“An ever-improving economy and the favorable relationship between supply and demand, have led to significant growth in both revenues and profits from 2009 to the current year. We expect this trend to continue through 2017,” says R. Mark Woodworth, president of PKF-HR. “The 1990s were the only other time we observed such a sustained confluence of positive economic and market conditions.”

With US hotels achieving all-time high occupancy levels, PKF-HR believes that hoteliers will be able to increase their average daily rates at an average annual pace of 5.7% from 2015 through 2017. At the same time, Moody's Analytics, PKF-HR's source for economic projections, is forecasting the annual pace of inflation to average just 2.5%.