Bay Area hotel openings in 2020 take huge hit

SAN JOSE — Coronavirus-linked economic woes torpedoed hotel activity in the Bay Area and all of California in 2020, according to a new report that sketches out the widening impacts of the deadly bug on the lodging sector.

The number of hotels that opened in both Northern California and Southern California, as well as the number of hotels under construction, plummeted during 2020 compared to 2019, a report by Irvine-based Atlas Hospitality Group shows.

In 2020, a total of 12 hotels opened in the Bay Area, down 55.6{911ea05452e114f1778c76ca86733b6032c246f8f651bb1f01d12abf04b54efb} from the number of hotels that opened in the nine-county region during 2019, according to this news organization’s analysis of the research report that Atlas Hospitality provided.

“COVID-19 has continued to decimate the hotel market,” Atlas Hospitality said in its report.

The hotels that opened during 2020 in the Bay Area accounted for 1,262 rooms, which was down 69.9{911ea05452e114f1778c76ca86733b6032c246f8f651bb1f01d12abf04b54efb} from the 4,192 rooms that opened in 2019, according to the information provided by Atlas Hospitality, which tracks the California lodging market.

“This is the worst market we have seen in 20 years of doing this survey, in terms of hotel projects being deferred or abandoned,” said Alan Reay, president of Atlas Hospitality Group.

The number of hotels under construction, measured by the number of total rooms being developed, totaled 6,205 in the Bay Area in 2020, down 13.8{911ea05452e114f1778c76ca86733b6032c246f8f651bb1f01d12abf04b54efb} from the number of rooms that were under construction in the region in 2019.