Growing NYC tourism shifts to outer boroughs, city says

Nearly 60 million tourists came to New York in 2015, mostly flocking to the outer boroughs, and now the hotel industry is hustling to catch up in Brooklyn and Queens to meet that demand and reap the economic benefits.

NYC & Company, the city’s marketing and tourism arm, said the 59.7 million tourists marked the seventh consecutive year of record-breaking numbers. Chris Heywood, an NYC & Company spokesman, said tourists want to stay in hotels in downtown Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens, because of their proximity to some key neighborhoods that have traditionally been diamonds in the rough, such as Sunnyside, Gowanus and Williamsburg.

He said some neighborhoods demonstrate “hotel demand is outpacing the supply.”

Since 2014, 61 hotels have opened in the city and 124 more are in the pipeline for 2016 and beyond, according to NYC & Company. Within three years, New York is expected to add nearly 26,000 new rooms.

He said 72 of the new hotels will be in Manhattan, such as the 40-story Renaissance Midtown on 35th Street that’s slated to open this spring. Brooklyn and Queens will have a combined 44 buildings go up in the near future, like the Gowanus Inn & Yard, and the Estate at Ravel in Long Island City.

By comparison, the two outer boroughs accounted for only 12 of the new hotels built in the last two years.

Lisa Linden, a spokeswoman for the Hotel Association of New York City, credited the increased marketing of the outer boroughs by the city as the cause behind the new hotel construction.

Starting in 2013, NYC & Company began a push to get return visitors to the outer boroughs with marketing efforts that spotlighted different neighborhoods.

“If the city’s tourism sector is strong in every borough, it should bode well for the hotel industry in every borough,” Linden said.

There were about 421,300 leisure and hospitality jobs last year, a 3.5 percent jump from 2014. Linden said hotel employees are part of the “lifeline” of the city’s job market, because many of those men and women go on to have long, fulfilling careers in New York.

And it’s not just the hotel workers that are getting the financial boost. Dan Biederman, president of the 34th Street Partnership, said the tourists who stay in the area during their trips usually spend their time shopping at local stores, eating at restaurants and relaxing in public spaces.

“You can hear about ten languages in Bryant Park over a lunchtime,” he said in a statement,

City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Sunnyside), said he, too, has seen an outpouring of tourist support for the mom and pop’s in western Queens over the last few years and welcomed news about the larger numbers. He noted, however, that the city needs to make sure that the new hotel space doesn’t infringe on what made those outer boroughs attractive in the first place.

“It helps to make our community more prosperous and well trafficked,” he said. “But there are some cautionary tales as well as having too many hotels, especially in residential neighborhoods.”