Data Room
Welcome to the Stay In Boston Data Room. This is where we put the figures rather than the adjectives: what a hotel room in this city actually costs across the year, who fills those rooms, where they come from, and what moves the market from one month to the next.
How much does a Boston hotel room really cost in January compared with October? Which foreign market spends the most here? How many hotel nights does a single convention generate? Every answer on these pages carries its source and its date.
Everything here is free to reuse — by journalists, students, researchers and anyone building something of their own — provided you link back to the page you took it from.
Spotlight
Why a media about hotels publishes data
Most travel writing about Boston runs on impressions. That is fine for describing a lobby and useless for deciding when to come. The Data Room exists to hold the other half: the measured, dated, attributable facts that actually change a decision — occupancy, average rates, visitor volumes, room nights, the seasonal curve.
The rules we hold ourselves to are short. Every figure names its source and the period it covers. Nothing is estimated, rounded up or inferred to make a better headline. Where the public data is thin — commencement season is a good example, and so is foliage tourism — we say so rather than filling the gap with a plausible number. And where two reputable sources disagree, we pick one series and stay in it rather than mixing them into a false average.
What you will find here today: the Boston hotel market in occupancy, rate and RevPAR terms, and how it rebuilt itself on price rather than on volume. A breakdown of who travels to Boston, market by market, including the fact that Canadians outspend British and Chinese visitors combined. And the month-by-month calendar that makes an October room cost roughly twice a January one, with the conventions, races and graduations behind it.
The room is not finished. We add to it as new official data is published, and we would rather add one well-sourced piece a month than five quick ones. If you use something from here, a link back is all we ask.