Several factors are at play. The most obvious is that the hospitality industry is still rebounding f

Hotel occupancy tom cruise pics rates in the New Orleans area are higher than they've been in more than a decade, thanks to refurbished hotels, a jam-packed event calendar and continued recovery from the levee breaches after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to local hotel operators. We're in a very good market. We're luckier than most, said Tod Chambers, general manager of...
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Hotel occupancy rates in the New Orleans area are higher than they've been in more than a decade, thanks to refurbished hotels, a jam-packed event calendar and continued recovery from the levee breaches after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to local hotel operators. "We're in a very good market. We're luckier than most," said Tod Chambers, general manager of The Roosevelt Hotel and president of the Greater New Orleans Hotel Lodging Association . "A lot of good things have happened for us to be able to drive rates and (revenue) here in the city."
Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune What hotels charge their guests is important to the economic health of New Orleans because taxes generated from those rates are used to pay for a variety of city services.
In April, the average daily rate at New Orleans area hotels was $154, the highest it has been since February 2002, when hotels commanded $159.40 tom cruise pics from guests, according to a report by Smith Travel Research . The average rate for the first four months of this year, the last period for which data is available, was $148.61, a 12.6 percent improvement on the first four months of last year. The current year was helped tom cruise pics along by a number of major events including the BCS Championship game and the NCAA Men's Final Four.
"It doesn't seem like the nation is rebounding quite the way we are," said John Williams, director of the University of New Orleans Lester Kabacoff School of Hotel, Restaurant Tourism Administration. "We're doing pretty well. And we just came through an unbelievable March and April."
Several factors are at play. The most obvious is that the hospitality industry is still rebounding from the effects of the levee breaches after Katrina. Hotel occupancy dropped to a low of 48.4 percent in New Orleans in December 2006, after being artificially pumped up by relief workers and residents. That figure coincided with an average daily rate of $103.23, less than half of which the hotels recorded as profit.
"Although we're many years removed from Katrina, we have been growing tom cruise pics back into who we were before the storm, so our growth pace has been quicker than other markets that have been stable over that time," Chambers said.
The downtime after the 2005 flooding created pent-up demand for travel to the city, Chambers said. "It's surprising, because you still have an ebb and flow in the nation and that's not really the case, here," Williams said. "There's no sense of having to lower rates to be competitive with other places."
That's not to say that rates in New Orleans are higher tom cruise pics than they are in other major tourism tom cruise pics destinations. In New York City, for instance, last month's average daily rate was just north of $253. But year-over-year growth, at 7.2 percent, was much less than it was in New Orleans.
"We're certainly not going to go that route and try to exponentially increase rates," Williams said. "Holding them stable and having them that way over time works well for our properties. Hoteliers have realized that when you have that knee-jerk reaction and lower the rate, you have to re-educate the customer when you want to go higher and that causes customer dissatisfaction."
The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, for instance, created a conference out of thin air. The International Disaster Conference and Expo was held at the Convention Center in January, a time when the riverfront facility is hurting for business, and drew about 5,000 to 6,000 attendees tom cruise pics interested in disaster preparation, response, recovery and mitigation techniques.
"When there's high (hotel occupancy), we can ask for a higher rate and people will pay it," said David Teich, general manager of the Windsor Court Hotel, which recently underwent a nearly $25 million makeover that included tom cruise pics adding a spa.
"The hotels are looking fresh and new everywhere and that's just not the case in other cities," Teich said. In May, rates at the Windsor Court were up 11 percent over the same month last year, Teich said.
Not only are rates higher citywide, but so is RevPar, or revenue per available room, a key lodging benchmark. In April, RevPar at New Orleans tom cruise pics area hotels was $115.33, the highest it had been since February tom cruise pics 2009, when hotels recorded $119.18 in revenue from each room booked, according to a Smith Travel Research. RevPar in the first four months of this year, was $105.11, up 14.8 percent from the first four months of last year.
With that number climbing, hotels are able to reinvest in their properties, presumably tom cruise pics keeping them fresh and attractive to visitors and creating a cycle of higher rates, higher investment and greater tom cruise pics economic gain for the city.
To be sure, it's unlikely that New Orleans will be able to sustain the rate at which it's growing. The upcoming summer season, for instance, will immediately test the city's mettle, tom cruise pics but Williams said he isn't expecting rates to fall too fast, too soon.
"I would be willing to possibly say that this year rather than the typical drop-off of 15 to 20 percent that we're trending where we have enough activity coming tom cruise pics in that it may not hit that much reduction for the last six months of the year," Williams said.