The lodging market in Boston and Cambridge was steamrolled by the pandemic, with the area’s occupancy rate plunging to less than 26 percent last year, driving revenue per available room — the performance measure used in the hospitality industry — down more than 80 percent, according to the hotel consultancy Pinnacle Advisory Group. The region fared only slightly better than New York, which had the biggest drop in the country.
An estimated 8,000 hotel employees are still out of work around Boston, and some jobs may not return for years, if ever.
International travelers, which made up 18 percent of visitor spending in Boston in 2019, fell by 78 percent last year; the biggest spenders among them, visitors from China, vanished when the airport’s three nonstop flights to Hong Kong and the rest of China were halted. Those flights have yet to resume, along with 15 other international routes including Rome, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Munich, Zurich, and Madrid.
“The devastation in Boston was significantly more severe than it was in the rest of the country,†said Adam Kamins, a director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics.
More than a dozen properties in Boston and Cambridge remain closed, including the 1,200-room Sheraton Boston Hotel, the biggest property in the city, located next to the largely dormant Hynes Convention Center. And those that are open are getting a fraction of the business they usually do.
Quote by Scoopster:Ok ok ok, just hear me out: pic.twitter.com/HdnTxIU1p7
— ŦÉเק (@Flip5ide666) March 28, 2021
Quote by BobR:Quote by Scoopster:Ok ok ok, just hear me out: pic.twitter.com/HdnTxIU1p7
— ŦÉเק (@Flip5ide666) March 28, 2021
This needs sharks