Rhode Island hotels were the fullest in the country in September, according to occupancy figures compiled by Smith Travel Research of Hendersonville, Tenn. The company calculates that 87 percent of Ocean State hotel rooms were occupied by guests in September, the most recent month for which the figures are available.
Among the other New England states, only Massachusetts could muster an occupancy rate greater than 80 percent in September. The Bay State’s hotel occupancy rate during the month was just shy of 81 percent.
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At the bottom of the list was Mississippi with a September hotel occupancy rate of less than 55 percent, in part a result of the casino gambling-fueled hotel building boom in Biloxi.
With Rhode Island’s hotels packed, average room rates in September rose to $114 per night from $104 per night last year, a 10 percent increase, according to Smith Travel Research.
In Massachusetts, average room rates in September increased by more than 12 percent compared to last year to top $128 a night. The most expensive hotel rooms, on average, in September were in New York where the average rate approached $144 a night in September, according to Smith Travel Research.
Refusing to overlook the obvious, local hoteliers attributed the high occupancy rates in Rhode Island to an increase in visitors among other factors.
“Providence has gotten some national publicity over the last few years, and I certainly don’t think that has hurt,” said Mark McHale, general manager of the Providence Marriott. The company McHale works for, Meyer Jabarra Hotels of Danbury, Conn., bought the Providence Marriott earlier this year.
“It was certainly an appealing market place to us to make this kind of investment by purchasing the hotel with the belief that things are going to remain strong in Providence,” McHale added.
For the first nine months of the year, Rhode Island’s hotel occupancy rate of nearly 75 percent was exceeded only by Nevada’s nearly 77 percent hotel occupancy rate for the period.
Providence’s hotel inventory isn’t large enough to be considered separately from the rest of the state by Smith Travel Research, but Boston boasted an occupancy rate of just over 82 percent in September, essentially unchanged from the same time last year.
The continued high demand for hotel rooms in Rhode Island has sparked interest in hotel projects among developers here, but a series of interest rate hikes in recent months may cool off some hotel building plans here.
“If you’re into a $30 million investment, and (the interest rate) goes up a quarter of a point or a half a point, that can make a big difference,” McHale noted. “I think the interest rates have probably slowed some of the hotel growth down a little bit.”
Among the hotel building projects that already are taking shape here is the $25 million hotel under construction at Union Station Plaza.
But overall Rhode Island’s inventory of hotel rooms has grown more slowly than those of other states.
In the first nine months of the year, the number of available hotel rooms in Rhode Island grew less than one-half a percent, according to Smith Travel Resources. Meanwhile, the hotel room inventories of neighboring Massachusetts and Connecticut grew 5 percent and 3 percent, respectively.
