Hotel CEOs expect financial losses from Sandy

Many of the open, with-power hotels in New York City are busy and even sold out in the wake of the deadly monster storm Sandy as stranded out-of-towners, powerless New Yorkers and nervous commuters book rooms.

The New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square — Manhattan's No. 1 largest hotel with 1,957 rooms, for instance — is completely sold out for tonight (Oct. 31), Marriott spokeswoman Kathy Duffy tells Hotel Check-In.

But, the Wall Street Journal reports, hotel owners nonetheless are expecting major financial losses from this ongoing event.

Why? Though hotels are replacing at least some or even all of the canceled guest room reservations, the story says, many of those canceled reservations involved lucrative meetings and events.

"For the most part, this will be lost business that you're never going to get back," Pebblebrook Hotel Trust chief financial officer Ray Martz told the Journal.

The Bethesda, Md.-based company owns hotels open and running in Manhattan such as the Affinia Manhattan and Benjamin.

Jeffrey Donnelly, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, told the Journal that he found hotel CEOs to be pessimistic.

"Without a doubt, CEOs seem to expect a net negative impact from this storm as compared to normal-for-the-year weather events," Mr. Donnelly said. "Damage is insured, but the loss of business here might not be."

We'll have to wait and see how it plays out for the owners.

Smith Travel Research investigates

We'll know more next Wednesday when industry data tracker Smith Travel Research completes its next survey, says STR's Freitag (whom you can follow on Twitter). For now, STR has less data than normal since some hotels in New York are closed due to flooding or forced evacuation.

"We were positively surprised when 95 hotels submitted their daily performance data to us," Freitag told Hotel Check-In on Tuesday. "Normally, our nightly sample is around 174 hotels and of course some properties were impacted by the storm.

The performance of the hotels that did report to us was not materially different from any other Monday in NYC, with occupancy just above 80% and an ADR around $290. So far our data is showing no impact positively or negatively from the storm.

We expect that this week's hotel performance numbers will allow us to get a good sense of the impact of the storm when we release the full data set next Wednesday morning."