The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the local hospitality market
Boston’s hotel industry has cratered this year, with revenue and consumer demand falling even more dramatically than in other big cities, as the region has suffered declines in travel for tourism, business, education, and medical care.
The crisis for Boston has been worse than in all but a few other US markets, according to a report released this week by the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Additional research provided by the hospitality data company STR showed that revenue per available room, a key industry metric, declined in August across the Boston metropolitan area by about 76 percent compared with the same period in 2019.
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Only Seattle and Oahu in Hawaii (which includes Honolulu) showed greater declines in that metric, which is based on the most recent available data and covers the period from Aug. 1 through Aug. 29. The numbers for Greater Boston continue a trend that has seen hotels lose out on their crucial summer season, with many remaining closed altogether. According to STR, demand for rooms was down by 56 percent for the year through July, with that figure exceeding 80 percent at the height of the coronavirus outbreak here.
No city’s hotels have prospered during the pandemic, but Chip Rogers, chief executive of the lodging and hotel association, said Boston has not reaped even the minor benefits of some other markets. Many hotel guests fly to Boston, rather than drive, he said, and areas with a lot of car visitation have seen some relief.
Meanwhile, the metropolitan area has not been able to draw sufficient travelers for outdoor activities, which are more attractive than indoor activities during the pandemic. The driveable, waterside metro area of Tampa and St. Petersburg in Florida saw its August revenue decline by only 36.6 percent, for instance.
“The areas that are doing comparatively better — no one’s doing really well — are the beach locations,” Rogers said.
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Meanwhile, some of Boston’s most important drivers of summer hotel bookings, which include conventions, colleges, and medicine, have been upended by the pandemic.
Paul J. Sacco, chief executive of the Massachusetts Lodging Association trade group, said although many hotels in the Boston area have shut their doors temporarily, one bright spot is that there have been few permanent closures. (One notable loss during the pandemic was the Hotel Buckminster, which announced in April that it would not reopen.)
“It’s not a pretty picture, and there’s very little light at the end of the tunnel,” Sacco said. “It’s going to take a while for us to recover.”
The crisis has been particularly hard for the workforce of the hotel industry, which employs about 163,000 people in the state. About 70 percent of those people are out of work right now, Sacco said.
Carlos Aramayo, president of the union UNITE HERE Local 26, which represents about 5,000 hotel workers around Boston, said a similar proportion of those employees are unemployed. And as the closures drag on, some of the relief programs that have kept people afloat — expanded federal unemployment payments, extended health benefits negotiated by the union — are expiring or will be soon.
Aramayo said the hotel industry needs public assistance to survive the crisis, and that he hopes that support will benefit the workers who are suffering.
“It’s important that if there is that kind of support forthcoming, that it doesn’t just go to the service of debt on these properties, but to the men and women who do the work day in and day out,” he said.
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Despite the difficult conditions, many hotels have continued to operate, serving the few travelers who are still coming. Some have shifted their business models, functioning as dormitories for socially distanced college students. And some that have been closed are reopening, hopeful that fall and winter will give way to a better 2021.
The Royal Sonesta Boston in Cambridge reopened this week in hopes of seeing a decent turnout for Labor Day weekend and building on that momentum.
“The idea is, get open now, survive, provide the level of service, and focus on cleanliness . . . and then ride the wave as, hopefully, travel opens back up,” said Mark Sherwin, executive vice president of operations at the hotel’s parent company.
Andy Rosen can be reached at andrew.rosen@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @andyrosen.
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