Hotels in the two areas most closely associated with convention business in the city continue to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects.
A bill awaiting Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature could funnel $222 million for improvements to the Convention Center and the Alamodome.Three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began taking hold in San Antonio, vacationers are filling rooms in the suburbs, but hotels downtown and near San Antonio International Airport continue to struggle with bookings.
The occupancy rate of 61.6 percent was higher than last year’s 60.5 percent but behind 2019’s 66.7 percent. “It used to be that the first quarter was a really strong quarter because we had a lot of northerners coming down for conventions because the weather is nice in San Antonio,” he said. “That area is still weak.”A flurry of conventions were canceled or scaled back during the pandemic. Since then, some companies and organizations have moved conferences to online or hybrid formats to save money, and after a few years of conducting business remotely, some employees don’t see a need to travel.
Visit San Antonio, the public-private organization that markets the city to convention planners, has 586 meetings booked this year. That’s up from 508 last year, 527 in 2019 and 582 in 2018, an especially strong year for the industry. City officials and tourism leaders say the upgrades are sorely needed if San Antonio is to best other cities for conferences, trade shows and other events. The city has missed out on more than $525 million in revenue from major conferences over the past five years because the Convention Center is not big enough, according to Visit San Antonio.
“We’re expecting that supply growth to slow dramatically, and that’s not just in San Antonio, but statewide and even across the country,” Vaughn said. “We're going to see the supply increase tail off, which will be good for the existing hotels."
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