The economy’s down everywhere, but if you look at it closely, there’s a huge difference from city to city. Chip Conley’s San Francisco based boutique empire, Joie de Vivre, is going full steam ahead with a rash of new openings - 2 new hotels recently launched under the JDV umbrella in September, with plans to launch another 4 before the year end and 2 more in 2009.

The two hotels just opened are the Waterfront in Oakland’s Jack London Square, which opened on Sept 23 after a $6 million renovation, and the Durant in Berekeley which opened Oct 16 after a $9 million renovation of the property and its Gastropub, Henry’s.

Slated to open on Nov 8 is the much awaited Citizen in Sacramento (see review), which opens after a whopping $70 million investment. In between, JDV has three more openings lined up on a single block on Seventh Street in SoMa. All three are Best Westerns, but each will be focusing a different age group under a management contract with JDV.

The Good Hotel will be catering to the youngish crowd south of Market Street, while the Americania will target families with playful, retro-style furnishings and board games in the guestrooms, and the Carriage Inn will be looking for an older demographic with literary themes and a San Francisco eccentric or local luminaries like Lili Coit and the Mitchell Brothers profiled in each room providing a glimpse of San Francisco’s notorious and diverse counterculture. All three will still be Best Westerns, but management will be from JDV.

And on top of that, JDV has another two hotels slated for openings in 2009 - The Maya in Los Angeles, and the Shorebreak in Huntington Beach.

Meanwhile, back on the East Coast, New York hotels are drowning in cancellations and lack of new bookings. Most have stopped or completely abondoned any expansion plans or new hotel openings. I wrote earlier about their problems with business travelers, but it seems that the extended bear run on Wall Street has set off jitters even among leisure travelers, including families and foreign visitors, who are now shelving NY travel plans for the near future.

During the first half of the month, hotel occupancy rates in the city declined more than 11% each week, compared with the same period last year, according to a report by J.P. Morgan Chase and Smith Travel Research.

Hotels are lowering rates and offering special discounts in a bid to reverse the negative momentum. But the situation could get even worse if the City goes through with its plan to hike hotel room taxes by 3% to nearly 18%.

Remains to be seen how the holiday season bookings go. November looks like being a bad month, but if the December bookings are upto scratch, then maybe the New York hotel industry will be able to survive the downturn, and start anew in 2009.

Photo courtesy and copyrights Joie de Vivre Hospitality.

Posted on October 19th, 2008 by PLing
Filed under: Hotels