With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1477631
H ow important are hotels to a city's economy? Crucial, I hear from the most unlikely suspects. They help reduce the need for short-term vacation rentals, some provide valuable community meeting spaces, and they're essential to attract convention and non-conven- tion visitors. How important are they to the people with money to fi- nance construction? Far down the list on an adjusted Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The money-loaners are the most enthusiastic about pro- viding the financing to build places for people to live. That's a fundamental need, and not going away anytime soon. Next is offices. In spite of all the talk of the coming world order of work-from-homers as a result of the pandemic, office space is being snapped up. Industrial, you can't get enough of it, what with all the online shopping that needs distribution centres. But hotel rooms? Well, that's a vari- able luxury. And it's one that people have shown they can live without during an economic or worldwide health crisis. That makes hotels one of the toughest projects for any builder to take on, especially in a region like ours already beset with high land prices, trades shortages, bumpy conditions for materials and city-permit- ting processes that can be their own form of hazing. Hotel Recall The Lower Mainland is dealing with a serious hotel shortage. While developers continue to prioritize residential, office and industrial, some have started to turn inn-wards By Frances Bula L A N D VA LU E S CHECKING IN Landa Global Properties and Arno Matis Archi- tecture are bringing a part-residential, part-hotel structure to life in Richmond All that is playing into the current hotel situation in the Vancouver region, where there's a lot of renewed anxiety about the hotel room shortage. It was a hot topic before the pandemic, when tourism and business types were warning that the city was losing 100 rooms a year, that no new sup- ply was coming on, that hotels were at a near zero percent vacancy in peak periods, and that this all had the potential to affect tourism, conventions, sports events and more. In the meantime, the region lost quite a few mid-range hotel rooms the last two years as the province bought up proper- ties everywhere from the Best Western on Kingsway in Van- couver to Travelodges in Sur- rey and Chilliwack during the pandemic downturn to use as shelter for homeless people. Now, almost three years lat- er, it's a topic again as tourism levels return to Before Times numbers. Reports from Des- tination Vancouver show that the number of visitors to the region is anywhere from two times to 900 times higher than BCBUSINESS.CA ( the informer ) SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 BCBUSINESS 15 it was a year ago, depending on which group you're looking at. (Double the number of locals; 900 times for travellers from Australia, for example.) One major hotel operator told me they started getting so many bookings in April and May that they had to turn people away because they couldn't bring back staff fast enough. The city is preparing for some big influxes of visitors in the com- ing decade, with the Invictus Games in 2025, FIFA World Cup matches in 2026, and possibly the Winter Olympics in 2030. And the current count on hotel rooms is 23,292 in 163 proper- ties in all of Metro Vancouver, with just over 13,000 of those in Vancouver itself. The mayors of the two big- gest cities in the region hyper- ventilate a little bit when I call them about the situation. In Surrey, I almost can't get Doug McCallum off the phone as he talks about the desperate need out there if his city is going to keep attracting the kinds of international events to its new sports facilities that the city has been working overtime to lure. Right now, it has two large hotels and then a scattering of smaller motels here and there, for a total of 26 in all of Surrey and Langley, compared to 78 in Vancouver alone. "Sports tour- ism in a young city like Surrey is critical," said McCallum as he talked about international soft- ball and cricket tournaments. "But we don't have the hotels to put these people up. Right now, we're putting people in Rich- mond and other places." Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart is looking at developing a plan to create 5,000 to 7,000 more hotel rooms as part of his election campaign. (The idea was still being worked on as I type this on a hot summer day.) That's the number tourism pros have said the city needs to work toward if it's going to move up