A - Geoff Ballotti
Analyst
Sure. It's probably a little bit different on the infrastructure side, and we could talk about that in a second. But to your first part of your question in terms of what we're seeing, I'd say we're all still optimistic on the team, Lizzie. Normalized April demand was performing as Michele said, similarly to March. But that wasn't until last week where we saw RevPAR improve by 400 basis points, running about a full point ahead of the prior year. So the pace for May, 20 days out with a third of our business on the books, is trending in line with our revised outlook with pricing holding firm, and I think that's really important. Our franchisees realize that there is still pricing power out there, that their ADRs are still well below inflation and a good room for ADRs to run. And I've got to give a shout-out to our teams who are working so hard to communicate with our franchisees, our revenue management best practices to really drive rate and margin. We have a global conference coming up in a couple weeks, and that will be what we're talking about, ensuring that franchisees are building that base business with contracted, negotiated business, really taking advantage of all of our on-demand and digital marketing, to drive occupancy. So pricing holding firm, majority of our franchisee revenue, as you know, I think it was your question to Michele on last month's call, is there seasonality? There is. A third of our hotel's full-year demand shows up in June, July, and August, and so we're exiting April with momentum. And we're encouraged that leisure transient will pick up into the summer months, and there are lots of other reasons for that optimism. Our cancellation rates are holding steady. They are not ticking down. Our average lead times are holding steady at 20 nights, and our average lengths of stay are still well ahead of where they were pre-COVID level. In fact, in the quarter, they picked up 3% year-on-year based on the paid media campaigns that our marketing funds were running, and hit 1.95 nights, was significantly higher than they were pre-COVID level. So on the transient side, our middle-income guests are still more employed with wages and with savings higher than pre-COVID, and nearly half of all Americans are still saying that they are planning a vacation for this summer, which is, we don't have foresight to in terms of our booking windows. But the back part of your question, we're optimistic on the blue-collar everyday travel fronts. We're seeing increasing private on-shoring and public infrastructure demand, although it did start off slower than what we saw in the fourth quarter in terms of that 150 basis points. And Michele, I don't know if you want to add anything to that.