Outer boroughs riding wave of new hotel development

According to the Wall Street Journal, about 19 new hotels are currently being built in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island, with dozens more in the planning stages. In addition, recently opened hotels outside of Manhattan include the 321-room Sheraton Brooklyn New York Hotel, and several smaller, non-union budget hotels like the Days Inn, Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn Express, and Americas Best Value Inn.

The demand from business and leisure travelers for affordable hotel accommodations is the driving force behind the proliferation of hotel development in the outer boroughs, as well as in the suburbs. These hotels essentially serve to accommodate the overflow of people whom either cannot find a vacancy or cannot afford a room in a Manhattan hotel. Outer borough hotels are also developing their own customer bases of friends and relatives of local residents whose apartments are too small to accommodate guests; they want to be close by but not spend a fortune for a hotel room. The average nightly room rate in Manhattan from January to August this year was $228, in Brooklyn, only $140 a night.

Roger Bloss, CEO of Vantage Hospitality Group, which owns the Americas Best Value Inn brand, is quoted as saying that the "secondary and tertiary markets in the last 5 years have become extremely well received because people need to do business in those markets."  The vast majority of the hotels in these markets, however, do not fall into the full service category, like the newly opened Sheraton Brooklyn New York.

HTC members need to remember that the proliferation of these non-union budget hotels €œwhether in Manhattan or the outer boroughs has the potential to erode the union's density throughout the area.