GREELEY (AP) – Visitors looking to book a hotel room in Greeley this summer likely will have better luck than they would have last summer.
The northern Colorado city’s occupancy rate is down, the price per room is down and new hotels are slated to soon bring more than 200 rooms to the area.
A Rocky Mountain Lodging Report released in April showed the occupancy rate in Greeley fell from 73 percent in 2015 to 59.4 percent in April 2016.
“You can see how the market has weakened,” said Robert Benton, who helps put together the lodging report. “It’s primarily the decline in energy prices and the pullback in energy companies that have stopped drilling.”
The booming oil and gas industry in 2013 and 2014 pushed the demand for rooms way up, creating a tight market for those seeking short-term stays.
In 2015, the Homewood Suites by Hilton opened to fill some of the demand, but the demand already was waning. At the end of 2014, the market started to slip, and many of the oil and gas workers from Texas and South Dakota went home.
Two more hotel projects – the downtown hotel and convention center and a Holiday Inn Express north of Centerplace – are in the pipeline, according to the Greeley Planning Department’s commercial development list. The downtown hotel is slated for a 2017 finish, and the Holiday Inn Express recently was approved by the planning commission, but an open date isn’t yet planned.
Brian van Buskirk, owner of the Fairfield Inn, said oil and gas business accounted for about 30 percent of the hotel occupancy in the past few years, but the hotel’s occupancy hasn’t dropped 30 percent with the pullback.
“When oil and gas was strong, we displaced a lot of the normal business to Loveland, and now we’re getting some of that back so we’re not feeling the full brunt of it,” he said.
“And there’s still some oil and gas going on that fills rooms. They still have to service the rigs, and certainly there’s still the big boys out there drilling.”
When the oil and gas industry started to go south in 2014, Van Buskirk said they saw the problems coming and adjusted accordingly.
“We knew it was happening, so our projections went down quite a bit,” he said. “We saw it. We absorbed it. I think the length (of the downturn) has surprised us, but it’s nothing we weren’t prepared to weather out.”
He said there are many other industries in the area that keep the hotels busy.
“We still have our core business of agriculture, county government, JBS, Leprino (cheese factory). Some of those larger businesses are still here,” he said.
“It’s not a dire situation.”
Renee von Weiland, senior vice president of Spirit Hospitality, which operates the Hampton Inn and Suites, 2350 29th St., and the Candlewood Suites, 3530 29th St., in Greeley, as well as others in Loveland and Fort Collins, said she agrees the industry likely will start to rebound soon.
The slower year hasn’t slowed them down, though. Spirit has hopes to add about 500 rooms to the region in the near future, she said. More information was not immediately available on those hotels, though von Weiland did say one will be in the a development in Loveland.
In the meantime, von Weiland said, there is a fast-growing tourism industry in northern Colorado to keep them busy.
“Truly within a 500-mile radius, there’s over 16 million people, and within 500 miles, people think, ‘Oh, we can drive there,’” she said.
Plus, there’s development in Loveland to attract even more of those travelers, referencing the many projects that have been announced along the Loveland corridor of Interstate 25.
“Almost 23 million cars go through northern Colorado on I-25 every year,” she said.
All of those factor into the 200-300 rooms being built in Greeley.
It’s normal to see planned hotels continue to move forward – even in a slow market.
“It takes a year to build a hotel,” he said. “Sometimes you just say, ‘Well, I’m just going to go ahead and do this because I know eventually markets are going to get better.”
And all things considered, von Weiland said the market isn’t as bad as it could be.
“As I said, 2014 and 2015 were banner years,” she said. “Our numbers right now are kind of going back to before that, which is still good.”
Even without oil and gas, von Weiland said she thinks other local industries will carry the area hotels.
“There’s so much coming into northern Colorado. The growth of northern Colorado is really pretty amazing,” she said.
“I kind of feel like we’re going to be a destination.”