Springfield hotel/motel market continues steady

Springfield is not only a nice place to live, it's a nice place to visit. Thousands of people a year visit for business and pleasure and many of those stay over-night in the city's hotels and motels.

There are more than 5,600 hotel and motel rooms in Springfield according to Tracy Kimberlin, executive director of the Springfield Convention & Visitors Bureau. The CVB markets the city to tourists and meeting planners to increase overnight stays in Springfield. This ap-proximate figure of lodging rooms in-cludes the most basic and inexpensive rooms as well as the most luxurious ac-commodations available, Kimberlin said.

Springfield hotel and motel guests are about "35 percent business, 35 percent leisure, 20 percent meeting and conventions, and the rest miscellaneous," Kim-berlin said. Most leisure travelers staying in city hotels and motels are families, he added.

Choices

People who stay overnight in Spring-field have a wide selection of hotels and motels to choose from, with several properties added recently to the market. Since 2000, Country Hearth Inn & Suites, The Courtyard by Marriott, Hampton Inn Suites, and The Residence Inn all have been built, according to Kimberlin. Like most Springfield lodging, these are limited-service properties without restaurants and other services available to guests. Limited-service hotels have been the trend since the middle 1980s, said Kimber-lin. He added that the last full-service hotel that was built in Springfield is the Holiday Inn on Inter-state 44, which opened in 1986.

Supply vs. demand

The amount of rooms and variety of hotels available is not necessarily an in-dication of the demand for lodging in Springfield. "We're overbuilt," Kim-berlin said. "We ran about a 54 percent city-wide occupancy last year." There has been an increase in the supply of rooms since the early 1990s, and an in-crease of visitors staying overnight in Springfield hotels and motels, but the growth rate is lower than the number of available rooms, Kimberlin noted. "We have seen growth for some time," yet "the supply has outstripped the demand," he said.

Sept. 11, 2001

The effect of the Sept. 11 events on the economy and the travel industry also must be considered. Last year the number of occupied rooms was down three-tenths of a percent from the previous year, said Kimberlin, who attributes this decrease to the terrorist attacks and the economic repercussions that followed.

Positive thinking

Even so, there still is optimism for the local lodging market, as affirmed by Greg Walker, president of the Springfield Hotel/Motel Association and owner of the Howard Johnson Express at 2535 S. Campbell Ave.

"I feel like we've rebounded. The oc-cupancy is picking up," Walker said.

For the Howard Johnson Express spe-cifically, Walker said, he feels that a re-bound from Sept. 11 began in November or December 2001.

He said that the numbers may have been up due to a mild winter or drive-by traffic, with people driving more instead of flying.

He also said that unlike large cities that have more airport traffic and depend on business travelers, Springfield has more driving visitors and may not have been affected as much as larger cities in terms of hotel/motel guests.

Walker's hotel gets more leisure than business travelers and most generally families, said Walker.

There are other hotels that mainly cater to business travelers. Brian Sims, gen-eral manager for Courtyard Inn by Mar-riott at 3527 W. Kearney, said that the Courtyard Inn has a higher occupancy rate during the week since most of their guests are business travelers. Sims said that their occupancy hasn't sprung back yet because Sept. 11. He is hoping that in 2002 the hotel will be able to maintain the level of business it had in 2001.

Walker also expects that the market is "going to be pretty flat in the next couple of years." But while he does not anticipate growth in visitors to his hotel in the near future, he did have some encouraging things to say about the distant future of the local hotel/motel market. Walker said that the Springfield Hotel/Motel As-sociation is "really looking forward to the convention center being built." The association supported the additional tax "on the hotel/motel end of it," and he adds, "it looks like we're going to be getting it soon." He added that they hope to see an impact from the Wonders of Wild-life museum, and that the new air museum "will land here bringing us a market of new people."

Meanwhile, the CVB is spending $1 million a year in advertising, Kimberlin said.

The organization has a five-person convention sales staff that calls on meeting and sports planners to encourage them to bring their events in Springfield, said Kimberlin.