If you’re headed to New York City for the holidays, hotel rooms won’t come cheap.
The winter season is a popular time to travel, and hotels are already preparing by hiking up room prices, The New York Times reported. According to real estate analytics firm CoStar, tourists who stayed in the Big Apple in September doled out around $417 a night, the most expensive monthly rate in the city’s history. The company added that the only place with higher room costs during that same time period was Maui.
Of course, it’s never been cheap to visit the concrete jungle with $1,000 nightly rates becoming the norm at certain luxury resort properties this year. The newspaper ran the numbers and a king-size room at the St. Regis New York, a five-star hotel in Midtown Manhattan, will run you more than $1,800 in November. Overall, mid-tier hotels have increased their nightly rates by more than 50 percent since fall 2020.
“Hotel companies, like everyone else, are making up for lost time,” David Sherwyn, a professor at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, told the newspaper. The uptick can be explained by several factors including an increase in demand after Covid-19, the use of hotels as migrant shelters, and the citywide crackdown on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb. As a result, some people are now looking for alternative travel choices whether that means staying in more affordable New Jersey or postponing their plans altogether until after New Year’s.
“I knew New York City was expensive. But I didn’t expect the most affordable options to be $600,” 23-year-old undergraduate student Jon Lee admitted to the Times. Findings from a survey conducted in April of last year found that 69 percent of respondents wouldn’t spend more than $500 a night on accommodations and only 24 percent set their limit at $1,000 per night.
Nevertheless, rooms are filling up. In fact, a whopping 91 percent of New York City hotel rooms were booked in September, which is about the same occupancy level as before the pandemic, CoStar said. The agency also forecasted that New York City will welcome 65 million visitors by the end of 2024 and in 2025, that number could surge to a record 68 million.
