The health of the city’s hotel industry is a crazy-quilt pattern of mostly optimistic but confusing and conflicting cross-currents. Large new hotels continue to open even as famous old ones close for good. Occupancy’s way up over 2021 but still below pre-Covid times.
His organization is lobbying the city to slash the tax to 2.875% for at least two years. In June of 2021, the city under former mayor Bill de Blasio dropped the tax entirely for only three months — “not enough to do much good,” Dandapani said. Try, too, to ignore the sorry spectacle of the Chinese-owned Waldorf-Astoria, which, as we reported this week,Of a dozen up-market Manhattan hotels that closed after Jan. 1, 2020, only three have firm plans to reopen, according to an analysis prepared for CBRE by Lodging Econometrics. They are the uptown Four Seasons, the former Roger on Madison Avenue , and the Surrey on East 76th Street, rebranded as Surrey, a Corinthia Hotel .
Occupancy in 2022 was 75%, still below the pre-COVID average of 86% but vastly more than in the bleak days of 2020 and 2021.