PORTSMOUTH, NH—By the end of the third quarter, 701 hotels totaling 82,484 rooms had already opened in the U.S. with another 278 projects/29,532 rooms forecast to open by year-end, according to analysts at Lodging Econometrics. The Total 2017 Forecast is 979 projects/112,016 rooms, representing a 12 percent increase over the actual number of hotel openings in 2016, which stood at 850 hotels/99,881 rooms.
With slight increases in recorded occupancy, new supply in 2017 should be easily absorbed, Lodging Econometrics says. Demand growth, however modest, still continues to exceed supply growth.
Almost half of the hotels expected to open this year are upper midscale, at 450 projects/43,755 rooms, or 46 percent of the total. This is followed by upscale hotels, at 265 projects/35,362 rooms. These two chain scales represent 73 percent of the 979 projects anticipated to open through the end of 2017.
Lodging Econometrics forecasts that 1,146 projects/130,633 rooms will open in 2018 and another 1,153 projects/134,990 rooms will open in 2019. Though accelerating, the new openings peak in this cycle is likely to be a distance from the 1,341 projects/154,257 rooms that opened in 2008.
