Travel booming close to home
By Chris Woodyard
USA Today
Upscale urban hotels, scraping around for new guests to replace the well-heeled jet setters who usually grace their lobbies, are finding them in their own back yards.
Hoteliers say families and couples on weekend getaways are filling rooms that might otherwise go empty, salvaging earnings at a time when business travel hasn't fully picked up.
"The new phenomenon, post-9/11, is, 'Let's get a baby-sitter and drive into the city for the weekend,'" says Spencer Rascoff, vice president of travel seller Hotwire.com.
Hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria and the new W Times Square in New York say they're selling out on weekends.
The luxury Hotel Adolphus in Dallas reports brisk sales of its one-night "honeymoon package," a terrace suite, dinner and breakfast, bottle of White Star champagne and chocolate-covered strawberries for $450, about a third of the normal price. It's being promoted to Texans through radio ads.
Online travel giant Expedia says the most popular hotel booking destinations for New Yorkers and Chicagoans are New York and Chicago, respectively.
And online travel agent Travelocity found that while Chicagoans have booked 16 percent more hotel stays for this summer on the site this year compared with last, June-August bookings for hotels in neighboring states were up 30 percent.
The same pattern was true in Los Angeles, New York and even a more modest-sized market like Knoxville, Tenn. There, overall bookings for all destinations increased 29 percent, but bookings for locations in neighboring states were up 43 percent.
"The pattern of demand has changed," says Starwood Hotels & Resorts CEO Barry Sternlicht, which has the Westin, Sheraton, W and St. Regis brands. "You're doing much better on weekends than on weekdays, when you used to sell out."
He cited locations like the Sheraton Suites in Key West, southwest of Miami, and the St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point, Calif., south of Los Angeles, as examples of places where hotels are thriving because of drive-in guests.
That's good news for hotel bookers. The drive-to market is about six times the size of the fly-to market, says Robert Diener, president of Hotel Reservations Network, whose Web site, hotels.com, has seen bookings rise about 15 percent since Sept. 11.
Another reason it may be growing is that people appear to be driving farther. Some hotel guests are driving five or six hours instead of two or three hours, as they once did, says Chris Cahill, president of the 38-hotel Fairmont Hotels & Resorts chain.
Other guests are right next door. The 165-room Surf and Sand Resort in Laguna Beach, Calif., attracts locals who pay $285 and up a night to hear the surf crash outside their window.
How local? "I'm not exaggerating when I say 15-minutes drive away," says John Gates, assistant general manager. One couple who live a couple blocks away literally walked in.
Instead of the usual East Coasters and Europeans, the Stonepine Estate Resort in Carmel Valley, Calif., outside the Bay Area, is filled with Californians. "We found that our customer has switched a little bit," says Daniel Barduzzi, the resort's managing director.
Not all the vacation travel has been quick trips out of town. Some of it has been suburbanites who go downtown for the weekend.
The drive-in trend is not just a reflection of lingering fears of flying, says William Hanley, executive vice president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association. Part of it is the hassle factor at airports, especially for parents trying to manage young children.
