Blizzards hurt Washington D.C.-area hotels; housing locals only offsets lost business

Date: February 11 2010
Source: USA Today
Website: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/hotelcheckin/post/2010/02/blizzards-hurt-washington-dc-area-hotels-housing-locals-only-offsets-lost-business/1

Snowmageddon 2010 has not been kind to the Washington D.C. region's hotels, the Washington Post tells us this morning.

• Snowbound in a hotel? Tell us about it

Yesterday's blizzard caused groups to cancel, rather than go to a city that's been virtually shut down by unusual amounts of snow. Hotels including Hyatts, Kimptons and Ritz-Carltons offered discount rates to at least lure in some business from stranded locals and employees who needed to be near at work, the story says.

"A week that we expected to be nearly sold out has turned into 45 percent occupancy," Ed Virtue, general manager of Kimpton's Hotel Monaco in downtown Washington, told the Post. Housing local residents helped offset the loss of business from out-of-towners, but he expects "a definite loss in revenue due to the snowstorms," he told the Post.

Other hotels the Post checked in with:

• The Hyatts in Bethesda and Washington benefited from housing locals who'd lost electricity, Hyatt spokesperson Tammy Hagin told the Post. The Hyatt Regency in Washington D.C. also benefited when Amtrak, CNN and the Capitol Police housed employees at the hotel, though rooms were sold at a discount, the story says.
• The Hilton Garden Inn Arlington/Shirlington wound up being sold out last night and last weekend, the story says, because the county, a local theater and a public television station house employees there.
• The upscale, newly renovated Jefferson Hotel sold deluxe rooms for $195 a night - half of the usual rate. "It helped because we could recoup the loss from some rooms," Franck Arnold, managing director at the Jefferson, told the Post.