US Tops List of Hotel Openings During Pandemic

New data suggests the United States opened more hotels and rooms than any other country since the beginning of March.

While the U.S. opened 521 properties accounting for 55,395 rooms through October 1, the country has shown significant growth in project deferrals and abandonments, according to STR.

Only five additional countries have opened more than 2,000 rooms during the pandemic, including China (23,470 rooms), Japan (16,304 rooms), Germany (9,027 rooms), Canada (2,748 rooms) and the United Kingdom (2,481 rooms).

“Generally, projects that have already broke ground are going to be finished—but abandonments and deferrals, which are becoming more common, affect the total room count in the pipeline,” STR senior vice president Jan Freitag said. “The movement of projects into these phases is playing into the overall slowing of development activity because there isn’t that constant flow of projects moving into construction.”

“Additionally, there is no longer a rush to move projects from planning to construction because the record-breaking demand of 2019 isn’t there waiting for new hotels to open,” Freitag continued.

The financial struggles caused by the coronavirus’ impact on the travel industry resulted in 211 projects being deferred in the U.S., a 56 percent increase over the same period last year. Another 232 projects were abandoned, a 16 percent decrease from 2019.

In addition, the number of rooms in construction in the U.S. has declined from its peak in April (220,207 rooms), dropping to 216,063 rooms in September, which was still up 6.1 percent year over year.