Local Hotel Market Grows as National Market Declines

BOSTON- According to a recently released report on the State of the Lodging Industry the Boston hotel market is growing while the national trend in hotel development is declining. The study, released by Lodging Econometrics, a Portsmouth, NH-based hotel real estate company, is a quarterly report that looks at the nationwide trend of hotel projects.

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2000 a total of 1,591 projects and 222,871 rooms were in the active pipeline nationally as compared with a total of 1,911 projects and 284,371 rooms at the end of the third quarter of last year. In contrast, according to Peter Glucker, director of marketing communications for the firm, “Boston is a different story.”

Glucker tells GlobeSt.com that from 1998 to 1999 supply exceeded demand in the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is similar to the government’s definition of the MSA. By the end of the fourth quarter of 2000, demand growth was 9.2% while supply growth was 4%. “Demand outgrew performance by 5.2%,” notes Glucker. “That was the fourth best performance in the top 25 markets.”