Nearly 500 hotels have already opened in the U.S. so far in 2017 with another 573 projects with 64,385 rooms forecasted to open by the end of the year, according to analysts at Lodging Econometrics (LE). The forecasted 1,021 hotel openings—totaling 114,906 rooms—represent a 20 percent increase over the number of hotels that openings in 2016 (849 hotels/99,872 rooms). Of the new openings in 2017, 34 percent (344) are in top 25 markets.
Almost half of the hotels that are expected to open this year are upper midscale properties (477 projects/46,093 rooms) and another 289 projects/37,914 rooms are upscale properties. These two chain scales represent 75 percent of the 1,021 projects anticipated to open through the end of 2017. Nearly 500 of the projects will have between 100 and 200 rooms and 464 of the projects will open in suburban locations.
LE forecasts that 1,160 projects/133,880 rooms will open in 2018 and another 1,193 projects/137,393 rooms will open in 2019—still a distance from 2009’s annualized new openings peak of 1,316 projects/140,227 rooms.
