As any visitor to New York City discovers, the Big Apple isn’t the best place to get a hotel room. Rates top $300 per night, the highest in the country, and supply is quite limited.

At year-end in 2013, New York, with a population 8.3 million had fewer hotel rooms than either Chicago, with a population of just 2.7 million, or than much smaller tourist hot-spots like Las Vegas, Orlando, and Washington. Booming and gentrifying Brooklyn, with roughly the same population as Chicago, has a grand total of two full-service, major-brand hotels.