San Antonio Express-News: More hotels to be built around Pearl

The San Antonio Express-News reports on hotel development in the Pearl area north of downtown San Antonio. Reporter Madison Iszler reached out for some insights about the existing hotels and demand drivers in the area. The article, More hotels, including $37 million Residence Inn, to be built around Pearl, gives a solid rundown of current and upcoming development in the area. Source Strategies Senior Vice President Paul Vaughn is quoted extensively:

“You look at the success of Hotel Emma — if you’ve got a hotel that is that successful in that area, that’s going to make other people take a look and see if they can share some of that success,” said Paul Vaughn, senior vice president at local hotel consulting firm Source Strategies.

The article goes on to discuss the planned eight-story Residence Inn by Marriott, but also Oxbow Development Group’s planned hotel across the San Antonio River from the Pearl, as well as McCombs Enterprises’ plans to build a hotel near the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Source Strategies includes Pearl in its calculations for the downtown submarket, where the number of room nights sold was down 15.7% and occupancy was down 13% in 2023 compared with 2019. Revenue per available room — a key measure of hotels’ performance — was up 7.3% and average daily rates were up 27.4% over the same period.

“It’s been a slow improvement,” Vaughn said. “There’s still some ways to go for us to get back to where we were pre-pandemic.”

Clearly developers are showing confidence in San Antonio’s hotel sector as evidenced by these and other projects in the works.

“The demand is still lower than it was before the pandemic. But Visit San Antonio and the individual hotels are slowly chipping away at that,” Vaughn said. “These developers are not going to sink millions of dollars into these projects without some hunch that the market is going to continue to improve.”

Read the full article, More hotels, including $37 million Residence Inn, to be built around Pearl, on the San Antonio Express-News website.