Travel Pulse: COVID-19 Crushing NYC Hotel Industry
By Rich Thomas
January 27, 2021
New York City has always been resilient and has always bounced back from adversity, but the COVID-19 pandemic has been a particularly nasty opponent.
According to new data released by the Department of City Planning and reported by the New York Post, 146 of the city’s 705 hotels and 42,030 rooms of New York’s 128,000 hotel rooms have closed.
That’s 20 percent of all hotels and 33 percent of available hotel rooms.
And the analysis by the City Planners suggests the lodging industry in New York City won’t fully recover to pre-pandemic levels until 2025.
Vijay Dandapani, head of the New York City Hotel Association, said he thought the situation was even worse. Dandapani said he believes it’s more like 200 hotels that have closed.
“We have hotels closing every day,” Dandapani told the Post. “We fell off a cliff.”
Dandapani said many hotels — facing a daunting cash crisis and unable to pay their property tax debt and mortgage payments — will never reopen. Already, two major hotels have shuttered – the Hyatt in midtown and the iconic Roosevelt Hotel.