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What’s wrong with this picture?

July 15, 2009

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Look closely. This is a breakdown of available rooms by hotel size, courtesy of the American Hotel & Lodging Association’s latest industry profile. It clearly shows that most of the room inventory in America can be found at the small- and medium-size properties.

For example, in the “under 75 room” category, we have just over 1 million rooms. In the 75 to 149-room division, there are about 1.5 million rooms. Mega-resorts with more than 500 rooms represent about ten percent of the number of rooms.

And that’s not all.


Here’s the number of properties.

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As you might expect, the number of “under 75″ properties vastly outnumbers the rest, and taken together, hotels with fewer than 150 rooms account for well over three-quarters of all hotels.

So what’s wrong?

The first problem is us, and I include myself in this group.

Based on media coverage of the hotel industry, you’d think there were no small hotels, with the possible exception of the occasional bed-and-breakfast reviewed by a glossy travel magazine.

One reason is that big resorts can afford to hire expensive PR firms to promote their properties. Another is that many travel writers can be hotel snobs. They wouldn’t be caught dead in a small hotel — unless it was in Manhattan or Miami Beach.

The result is a very distorted perception of the industry.

The second issue affects the travel industry’s soothsayers. Small and medium-size hotels often don’t participate in computer reservations systems, so we have no idea if the hotel industry is “on sale” as everyone claims it is this summer, or if the silent majority of small hotels is somehow holding its own on rates.

I think there’s plenty of room for improvement, based on these numbers.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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6 comments

  • http://www.adventure-associates.com/ Adventure Associates

    Thanks for this article, Elliot. It’s good to see small and medium sized hotels are still alive and well – even if it seems like the big guys are taking over.

  • Jill

    Hi
    Anybody who has taken a lengthy road trip knows this is true. Just think of driving down the main drag of any town in New Jersey or Arizona and you see small motels lined up one after the other. Near a regional airport there might be one Hyatt and the rest are small hotels. Along major arteries are small hotels catering to truckers who don’t have sleeping cabs. Motel 6, Red Roof Inn etc. What would be interesting to see is the location of the hotel size in relation to the population size (or the number of tourists attracted – ie Branson and Scottsdale would be an anomalies).

  • David H

    Another reason why we probably see more articles on larger hotels and 4/5* chains are that I suspect 99% of corporate bookings are made with these companies, almost solely because these types of hotel will reward corporate with better room rates for bulk purchasing.

    Small-medium B&B’s or independant hotels can’t compete on price most times, and corporate doesn’t want to deal with 30 different hotels in 30 different cities when they have the convenience of dealing solely with a central booking and billing facilty for all 30.

  • Carver

    I wonder if it’ s really true that the smaller hotels don’t get any coverage. It seems to me that many writers focus more on chains that individual hotels. And that makes sense to me. A story on the Westin chain impacts far more people that a story about a specific Westin hotel. But still, within the chains are numerous smaller properties, most notably the mid-priced business class hotels such as the Courtyard, Hilton Garden Inn, etc. They seem to get a fair share of coverage.

  • Denise

    Great, I’d love to stay at one of the smaller places: *if* I can verify before hand that it’s not a roach motel or the neighborhood crack house and *if* I knew how to find these little places in cities I’ve never been to before. I’ve never seen them in the discount websites like Travelocity, Hotwire, and Orbitz. If I can’t find them, I can’t give them my business.

    So, I go with the big chains because I can find them and because I can be reasonably certain that if there is a problem, I can start my complaint at the front desk and work up to corporate if I absolutely have to. With independent places the buck stops at the owner, and short of small claims court, I’m out of luck if I’m not happy. Unless someone I know has been there, or I manage to find a bunch of reviews about them on the internet, I’m just not comfortable with diving head first into the unknown.

  • http://www.clarkecomputer.com Charles Clarke

    @Denise
    You’re very correct that quality differs greatly in smaller properties. I’ve stayed at hostels, B&Bs, budget hotels to 5 star resorts. In each category, some have been great and some were rotten. If I have a car available, I’ve made lists of possibilities from online and then driven by and seen if I want to stop. I can always fall back to the big chains. My girlfriend and I did well with this for B&Bs in Hawaii 3 years ago and will do some of that this year. It is rare that you only have a few options for a place to stay. If you are mainly staying in an area, you can book the first couple of nights at a chain and check out the possibilities that first day. Then either add more nights at the chain or go treat yourself to something different.

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