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Plenty Of New Room At Boro’s Inns

This Comfort Inn near JFK Airport is one of dozens of new hotels popping up throughout Queens.

By Ellen Thompson

Industry insiders predicted two years ago that the real destination of the New York City hotel boom wouldn’t be in Midtown Manhattan, where people might expect it. Instead, hotel development was heading towards the outer boroughs and when it reached Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island or the Bronx the development would be smaller in scale but impressive in impact.

“Many of the new properties, in diverse locations such as Staten Island, TriBeCa, the Lower East Side, Queens and Harlem, will anchor the start of economic and business development in these exciting new neighborhood destinations and will introduce global visitors to new experiences in the Big Apple,” said Cristyne L. Nicholas, President and CEO of NYC & Company, the city’s marketing agency.

Visitors landing at LaGuardia Airport and JFK International Airport have touched down not only the most diverse borough, but are checking into smaller hotels with fewer than 300 rooms each – whether they be chain hotels or higher-end boutique ones with trendy amenities – not the 1,000-room monoliths of Manhattan.

According to industry insiders, with new construction costs for hotels reaching $550 to $700 per square foot, not including the cost of the land, amenities at these smaller hotels like flat-screen televisions and wireless Internet are drawing in a large chunk of the city’s 41 million annual visitors, approximately 75 percent of whom are leisure visitors. The hotels additionally offer workout and spa rooms, and some in Queens even have pools.

The Hilton Garden Inn JFK in Jamaica, which opened last February, has embraced the smaller yet more impressive notion in hotel development with its 190 rooms. The newly built Wingate Inn LaGuardia in Flushing with its136 rooms and the mid-market 76-room Comfort Inn and Suites in Maspeth, two miles from LaGuardia Airport and offering free airport shuttle trips, are following the trends as well.

By the end of 2007 it is expected that New York City will have added nearly 5,000 new or renovated hotel rooms to its current inventory of more than 70,000, which is a plus, said industry insiders, since the city closed 2005 with 22 million room nights booked, an increase of 600,000 room nights over 2004.

With Municipal Parking Lot No. 1 being replaced by Flushing Commons, a $500 million mixed-use retail, residential, and hotel development, and the 220-room Hampton Inn LaGuardia Airport scheduled to open in early 2007, it looks like the borough will be ready just in time for the hotel boom’s arrival.