NYC becoming a lot more affordable
For many would-be visitors, New York City is a dream vacation — it’s rich with museums and historic sights, the home of Broadway theater, awash with every form of nightlife, and a true shopping and dining mecca.
However, the dream turns into a nightmare when visitors face the largest expense in their vacation budget: accommodations. For the past decade, this city has had the highest hotel rates in the Americas and has been in the top five most-expensive cities worldwide.
But that is changing. Each year, as the author of “Frommer’s EasyGuide to New York City” (the best-selling guidebook for the city for the past four years running), I create a massive spreadsheet of prices at about 200 hotels in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx and properties right across the river in New Jersey.
I go to several search engines and look up the rate for each hotel for a specific night during both low season and high season. I always choose a Sunday in February, because Sundays are the slowest nights of the week for NYC hotels (and January and February are the slowest months).
My other pick is a Tuesday in October, because the city is crammed with visitors from October through December, and since many of them are business travelers, Tuesday is the most-coveted day of the week to stay overnight.
Usually, I see a creep upward from year to year, but this year the opposite happened: prices dipped, in some cases drastically. At one major Midtown business hotel, the rate in high season went from a minimum $892 a night last year to minimum of $666 for this coming October.
Nearby, at a more modest hotel, the rate went from $429 a night during the high season in 2016 to $279 in 2017. And for a lovely budget property in Queens, the 2017 high-season rate was $116, a nice savings
off of the $159 rate we saw last year. The declines in off-season pricing were even sharper, with a number of good-quality hotels posting nightly rates of less than $100.
Are these prices written in stone?
Of course not. They are constantly shifting, and I’ll revisit them. But they do give a snapshot of the trends, which, in the case of almost every hotel I looked at, showed a softening in prices (about 20 hotels offered pricing equal to or higher than last year).
My guess is that this decline has to do with what’s being called the “Trump Slump.” According to the New York Times, flight-prediction app Hopper saw a 17 percent decline in searches for incoming travel to the United States. Other travel companies are reporting similar results. And New York City has always been a hugely popular destination for foreign visitors in 2015, 12 million of the 55 million visitors flew into the city from abroad.
Note to the reader: Please be sure to confirm all rates and details directly with the companies in question before planning your trip. The information in this column was accurate when it was released, but prices are competitive, sometimes limited and can always change without notice.
Pauline Frommer is the Editorial Director for the Frommer Travel Guides and Frommers.com. She co-hosts the radio program “The Travel Show” with her father, Arthur Frommer and is the author of the best-selling “Frommer’s EasyGuide to New York City.”