In 2011, developers added 4,404 new hotel rooms to the city’s existing 74,025 rooms, an annual increase of 5.9 percent and the highest on record, according to Smith Travel Research and the commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield.
Supply is projected to increase by 3.5 percent in 2012 and 4.1 percent in 2013. From 2005 to 2010, hotel room supply grew by 16.2 percent,
for an average of only 3.24 percent annually.
New hotels range from high-end boutiques in Greenwich Village and Chelsea to budget chains in less fashionable parts of Brooklyn and Queens. In addition to the new rooms, large existing hotels have undergone major renovations, including the former New York Helmsley Hotel which reopened earlier this month as the Westin Grand Central after a $75 million overhaul.
The hotel building boom has been buoyed by occupancy rates and revenues that have rebounded close to prerecession levels. Tourists and business travelers have filled up the new rooms, despite the European debt crisis and economic slowdown in Asia. The citywide occupancy rate fell to 77 percent in 2009 after the financial crisis, but it has rebounded to more than 80 percent in each of the last three years.
“Occupancy really has not dropped off through all this increase,” said Thomas P. McConnell, executive managing director of Cushman & Wakefield’s hotel transactions group.