Even as midprice hotels began losing business this past summer, luxury hotels continued to fill their rooms. Companies treated the hotels as perks for top executives and quality locations for high-level business meetings. And many leisure travelers considered a stay at a top hotel  even for a couple of days  to be worth the cost.

Times have changed.

Since mid-September, almost in parallel with the stock market turmoil, demand for fancy hotel rooms has plummeted. Patrick Ford, the president of Lodging Econometrics, said that luxury hotel room revenue rates “slowed in mid-September and really ratcheted downward during October.”

Revenue per available room, the standard measure of performance, dropped 14 percent at upscale and luxury hotels in the week ending Oct. 18 over the comparable week last year, according to Smith Travel Research. For hotels in general, the decline was about 8 percent.

Even in the best of economic times, most luxury hotels were not sustained by business from rich leisure travelers. Instead, those hotels depended on corporate travel, including meetings and conferences.