Occupancies have plummeted to record lows, with New York and San Francisco hotels registering rates below 17%, according to lodging data firm STR. The industry could shed 1 million jobs, according to one trade group estimate, and Marriott International Inc., Hyatt Hotels Corp. and others have furloughed thousands of corporate employees.
On Saturday, Apollo Global Management-owned Diamond Resorts, which sells time shares, announced that it would be allowing medical staff and first responders access to free suites. Last week, the owner of the Four Seasons on 57th Street in Manhattan said he would give doctors and nurses free housing at the luxury hotel, where rooms typically go for as much as $6,500 a night.
“Many of those working in New York City have to travel long distances to and from their homes after putting in 18-hour days,” said Ty Warner, the founder and chairman of Ty Warner Hotels and Resorts, which owns the property. “They need a place close to work where they can rest and regenerate.”
The Four Seasons is donating its rooms as part of a state program that’s attracted more than 70,000 retiree and out-of-state medical workers, said Dani Lever, spokeswoman for Governor Andrew Cuomo. Roiter declined to identify hotels in the city program that are lodging health-care workers, citing confidentiality issues.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio made hotels an early plank of his Covid-19 response plan, saying in a March 17 release that the city had identified 250 rooms in five small hotels. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo named five other hotels, including the St. Regis New York and the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, as potential sites for non-critical care or medical personnel.
The state wants to work with owners of larger properties, said Vijay Dardapani, chief executive officer of the Hotel Association of New York City. The trade group gave government officials a list of 15 hotels, each with roughly 500 rooms or more, and expects that as many as 10,000 rooms could be adopted for a variety of uses.
The owner of one large New York hotel said last week that, based on his conversations with Cuomo’s office, hotels are not ideally suited for use as intensive care units but could work for patients with less acute conditions. The state is assessing virtually every hotel in Manhattan, said the owner, who asked not to be identified because the matter was private.
Northwell Health, the largest healthcare provider in the state, has been crafting arrangements with hotels for staff who don’t want to return home, Chief Medical Officer David Battinelli said in a March 18 interview.
In the Aimbridge partnership, a two-month takeover of the 280-room Hilton in Chelsea could be had for less than $1.8 million, based on the published room rate of $106. The hotel advertised rooms at an average rate of $169 a night during the week ending Feb. 1, before the coronavirus curtailed U.S. travel, according to data compiled by Hotel Compete.