New construction, hotel glut put squeeze on older facilities

The rush to build hotels and grab a share of Columbia’s convention and hospitality market has resulted in an oversupply of rooms, offering visitors more choices, but placing more pressure on some older hotels to remain competitive, industry sources say.

The past four years have brought more growth and change than the last 20 years, said Lorah Steiner, executive director of the Columbia Convention and Visitors Bureau.

With more rooms on the market, visitors gravitate to the newer hotels, resulting in decreased occupancy rates in older hotels, she said. As a result, the overall city occupancy rate is between 56 and 58 percent.
“Because of the influx of new hotels this rate is much less than we’d like it to be, but we also understand that during a period of growth we would have this,” Steiner said.

Seven new hotels with 781 rooms have been built since 2003, with one more in progress and at least two scheduled to be completed in the next 18 months. The rapid growth has hit the city’s older hotels harder.

“This has a domino effect,” Steiner said. “With less income, it is harder to fund appropriate staffing levels and reinvest in hotel upkeep.”
One hotel, the Ramada Hotel and Conference Center, 110 Vandiver Drive, closed in September and was demolished.

“More closures could be on the horizon,” Steiner said. “Some hotels may change franchises to lower costs. In the end, we may emerge with a stronger industry and product, but the transition may not be easy.”

The oversupply of hotel rooms in Columbia is a double-edge sword, said Bob McDonald, general manager of Courtyard By Marriott, which opened at 3301 Lemone Industrial Blvd. in September 2005.

“We are overbuilt, but Columbia needed another Marriott product,” McDonald said.

Marriott Courtyards are geared to the high-end business executive trade, and Marriott hopes to fill that niche, he said.

“I think you will see more growth from other hospitality companies and we will be in the same status of being overbuilt for a while,” McDonald said.
Steiner’s office lists 33 hotel/motels with 3,386 sleeping rooms in the city. The opening of a Country Inn and Suites on Keene Street this spring is expected to add another 86 rooms.

Ten of those properties are listed as having convention or meeting facilities totaling 53,399 square feet of meeting space. The two largest properties are the Holiday Inn Select Executive Center at 2200 I-70 Drive, with 331 sleeping rooms and 15,340 square feet of meeting space, and the Stoney Creek Inn and Conference Center at 2601 Providence Road, with 189 sleeping rooms and 12,290 square feet of meeting space.