Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
NEW HOTELS CHECK INTO BROWARD
A boom in new hotels suggests happy days are here again for tourism.
About a dozen hotels will open in Broward this year — the biggest surge in the county in the past decade.
The new accommodations will stretch from Pompano Beach to Hollywood, and increase the number of rooms by about 2,000 to more than 35,000.
New hotels this year include:
the 130-room Home2 Suites by Hilton Fort Lauderdale Airport-Cruise Port in Dania Beach;
the 163-room Plunge Beach Hotel in Lauderdaleby-the-Sea and the 407-room Hyde Resort & Residences in Hollywood;
the 102-room Hampton
Inn Fort Lauderdale/Pompano Beach hotel, expected to open May 26;
the 108-room Fairfield Inn & Suites Downtown Fort Lauderdale, slated to open in December;
a 112-room Residence Inn, which will open in the Center Port Business Park in Pompano Beach in June;
the 150-room Tryp by Wyndham Maritime Fort Lauderdale and the 290-unit Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort;
Dania alone could welcome four new hotels, including the 143-room Morrison Hotel, 104-room Comfort Suites Downtown Dania and 142-room Wyndham Garden, with a former Sheraton rebranding to Le Meridien.
It’s “super-exciting,” said Stacy Ritter, president and CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau, the county’s official tourism marketer.
And it is “due largely to an influx of affluent travelers and greater recognition of the destination as an attractive and competitively priced place to do business and enjoy the benefits of our appealing lifestyle and surroundings.”
Preliminary visitation numbers released by the bureau show Broward welcomed 12.27 million domestic visitors in 2016, up 4 percent from 2015, according to preliminary numbers from the bureau. A million international travelers visited last year, excluding Canadians.
Hoteliers and industry analysts seem fairly confident the county can easily absorb the room surge. But some areas may fare better than others.
“Most of the new supply of rooms is not on the beach. The beach will fill up first, so Fort Lauderdale will be fine,” said Christian Charre, senior vice president of Miami-based CBRE Hotels. “For limited-service hotels on the outskirts, the situation may be more competitive … still travel is up, and the expansion at Fort LauderdaleHollywood International Airport is working, so 1,800-plus more rooms is not major. I think it should be easily absorbed.”
So far this year, Broward’s tourist arrivals are about even with 2016, but room rates and occupancy in traditional hotels are down, Ritter noted.
Currency and economic woes in source markets such as Canada and Brazil helped keep some wouldbe visitors at home.
And as nontraditional accommodation alternatives such as Airbnb and HomeAway become increasingly popular with travelers, traditional hotel occupancy has taken a hit.
The hotels are coming on line as Broward becomes a more powerful and attractive market, said Daniel Peek, senior managing director at commercial real estate firm HFF.
“Miami has become more expensive, busy and crowded, while Fort Lauderdale offers a different experience,” Peek said.
Fort Lauderdale has seen dramatic changes in 20 years in terms of investments on the beach, the cruise port and airport and in retail, all of which bode well for future tourism demand, he said.
“I anticipate that over the next 10 to 20 years, Fort Lauderdale will continue to be a very attractive market,” Peek said. “It’s a pretty dynamic market, generally speaking.”
Jay Patel, president and CEO of Luckey’s, which has eight hotels in Broward and recently broke ground on its ninth, said that “South Florida is still doing great” in terms of tourism. Patel pointed to expanded airline service, a strong cruise market and the soon-to-launch Brightline passenger express train service.
Other hoteliers such as Doug Barrow, general manager at the newly opened Plunge Beach Hotel, also aren’t too worried about the influx of new rooms, having experienced rapid absorption of even more rooms in other top Florida tourism destinations such as Orlando.
“This area has such a strong demand from leisure travelers all over the world and so I think there’s still plenty of room for growth in hotels [in these parts],” he said.
Ritter is optimistic about the summer. “We're going to be better than OK,” she said. “Americans will travel more domestically than in summers past. So I think summer looks good in terms of visitor numbers.”