Businesses like it when tourists and conventioneers visit Baltimore ? but love it when they sleep over.
According to the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, tourists added $2.96 billion to Charm City?s economy in 2006, a whopping $2.17 billion of that total coming from visitors who slept over. Keeping tourists overnight seems to be the key for hotels, and is a big factor in recent expansion.
“For years, we have talked about the lack of hotel rooms, and now we are getting them,” said Nancy Hinds, vice president of public affairs for the visitors bureau. “They can complement one another.”
According to the Downtown Partnership, a nonprofit group dedicated to the improvement of downtown Baltimore, there are 5,968 hotel rooms in downtown Baltimore, consisting of a one-mile radius from Pratt and Light streets.
The most recent hotel opening downtown is the Hampton Inn at Camden Yards. Opened in early December, the 126-room Hampton Inn is representative of the niche that smaller hotels have found in the Inner Harbor.
Mike Evitts, a spokesman with the Downtown Partnership, named several other hotel projects that are currently being worked on, including seven that will be around the same size as the new Hampton Inn.
“There are 1,296 new hotel rooms under construction,” Evitts said. “You always want to be careful, but hotel developers look at what kind of inventory there is currently.”
Projects going on right now include the development of old business offices near Baltimore and Redwood streets into several new hotels. Evitts referred to this redevelopment effort as “Baltimore Street?s hotel row.”
Evitts also reports that there are 1,296 new hotel rooms under construction in downtown Baltimore, with 794 more hotel rooms planned for 2007. The biggest project being worked on right now is the Hilton Baltimore Convention Center Hotel.
The $300 million-plus 757 room project is set to open in the August 2008.
The development “attracts new business that may have overlooked Baltimore,” Hinds said. “It will make us more competitive.”
