For a recent Friday night at a Hilton in Times Square: $537, including a daily $35 “destination charge.”
A night at a Hotel Indigo in Lower Manhattan: $414.
The Aloft Hotel overlooking LaGuardia Airport in Queens: $351.
New York City has never been a budget destination, but many travelers are experiencing sticker shock over the high cost of a night at a hotel, especially as the peak holiday tourism season begins.
The average price of a hotel room in New York City in September climbed to $417, the highest monthly rate ever recorded in the city by CoStar, a real estate analytics company, since it started tracking the data in 1987.
The only place with more expensive hotels for that same time period was Maui, according to CoStar.
In New York, room rates can vary wildly across hotel classes, and it is not uncommon for high-end properties in Manhattan to charge more than $1,000 a night. A king room on a Friday night in November at the St. Regis New York costs $1,854, after fees and taxes.
But hotel rates overall have climbed as tourists are once again filling the city’s sidewalks, reviving an economic pillar that ground to a halt during the coronavirus pandemic.
Officials at New York City Tourism + Conventions, which promotes tourism in the city, said they had not seen indications that room rates were dissuading tourists from visiting. The agency estimates that nearly 65 million people will visit the city this year, just shy of the 66.6 million people in 2019. It projects that more than 68 million people could visit in 2025, which would be a record.
Some travelers, however, say that the rates have influenced where they stay, leading them to spend the night in New Jersey or on Long Island, or with friends. Others have postponed their trips altogether until hotel prices drop, usually after the new year.
For a 10-day trip to New York City at the start of fall, Rahul Chhibber knew he wanted to stay in Manhattan. He dreamed of waking up as the city roared to life and spending his days people watching and writing in cafes. Then he saw the hotel prices.
Flabbergasted and frustrated, Mr. Chhibber kept broadening his search. First to the boroughs outside Manhattan, then to the suburbs. He eventually found an acceptable rate: $130 a night for an Airbnb in Yonkers, near a commuter rail station with access to New York City.
“I don’t mind spending the money when I know it is worth it,” said Mr. Chhibber, 32, who ended up visiting the city from London for 10 days. “I don’t understand how normal people can go there, especially if they have kids.”
Jon Lee visited New York City five times over the past year to see his brother, who lives in Queens and works at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. For one of his visits, he had originally intended to come for a long weekend in December, but he postponed his plans until after the holidays because the least expensive rate in Manhattan was about $600 a night at a Holiday Inn. In February, rates were around $200 to $300 a night, he said.
On his other trips this year, Mr. Lee said he stayed with friends and once with his brother. When his larger family traveled with him over the summer, he said, they opted for a Hyatt in Jersey City, N.J., to cut down on hotel costs.
“I knew New York City was expensive,” said Mr. Lee, 23, an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado. “But I didn’t expect the most affordable options to be $600.”
Elijah Krain and his girlfriend had planned to travel in August from Philadelphia to the U.S. Open in Queens. They both grew up outside New York City and visited often but had never stayed overnight in a hotel.
“Anything that we saw online was a couple hundred dollars a night,” said Mr. Krain, 24, “or advertised as affordable and all of a sudden, all sorts of fees made it in the $300 to $400 range.”
The couple opted to stay at a family friend’s apartment in Manhattan instead.
Richard Born, a hotel developer who operates 24 properties in New York City with 4,000 rooms, said that, on average, hotels had not raised the price of a room beyond the rate of inflation over the past two decades.
He noted that hotels charged more this time of year because it is when they make the bulk of their annual revenue.
“New York City is not much more expensive than the other three or four premier markets in the United States and it’s still materially cheaper than Europe,” said Mr. Born, whose hotels include the Bowery and the Ludlow. “Were it not for the $400 rate in October, you could not survive.”
In the early months of the pandemic, travel and tourism ground to a halt and prices plummeted. Now, as visitors have returned to the city and tourism has rebounded, a night at a mid-scale hotel has jumped more than 50 percent since fall 2020, according to CoStar.
Tourists are still booking hotels, though: Across the city, 91 percent of rooms were occupied in September, about the same as just before the pandemic, the company said.
Experts in the hotel industry said that rising room rates reflected an overall increase in hospitality and travel costs in cities across the country but also special circumstances in New York.
The number of available hotel rooms has declined following an influx of migrants, who have been placed in struggling hotels. Over the summer, about 11 percent of the 136,000 hotel rooms in the city were set aside for migrants.
Also, since the pandemic the city has implemented laws to drastically curtail new hotel development and greatly restrict short-term listings on sites like Airbnb. More than 92 percent of Airbnb’s local listings were removed to comply with new regulations, which limit the number of guests to two and require the property owner to reside in the unit. Most of the site’s listings were in boroughs outside Manhattan.
“It’s the law of supply and demand,” said Theo Yedinsky, the vice president of public policy at Airbnb. “New York can’t just be a place that the rich get to visit.”
Mr. Born, the hotel developer, said the new limits were “very good” for his business but he worried about the longer-term consequences. Limiting new inventory could drive hotel rates so high over the next five to 10 years that some tourists decide not to visit, he said.
A recently introduced bill in the City Council would loosen some restrictions on short-term Airbnb rentals, including by allowing travelers to stay in one- and two-family homes.
Another factor in New York City is that employees at most hotels are part of the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, a politically influential union whose contract is considered the strongest in the country for hotel workers. For instance, hourly pay for a front desk agent starts at more than $30 an hour.
David Sherwyn, a professor at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, pointed to the lost revenue during the pandemic as another reason: “Hotel companies, like everyone else, are making up for lost time.”
The post New York City Hotel Rates Soar to Record Heights as Holiday Travel Nears appeared first on New York Times.
