24 hotel projects in island pipeline
Puerto Rico's 13,000 guestrooms support more than 70,000 jobs in Puerto Rico, according to the Puerto Rico Tourism Co. At present, there are 24 projects in the hotel development pipeline, representing an investment of more than $2.1 billion. Of that number, 14 are close to completion and are expected to add 1,900 rooms when open, said Jaime Lopez, executive director of the Puerto Rico Tourism Co.
Puerto Rico has 13,465 hotel rooms, according to a room census taken this year by Smith Travel Research. Paradores, or inns, and guesthouses represent an additional 1,500 rooms.
Opening this month is the 503-room Sheraton Puerto Rico Convention Center Hotel & Casino, the anchor property for the Puerto Rico Convention Center in San Juan. The property will have 35,000 square feet of meetings space and the largest ballroom in San Juan. Event space includes open-air verandas and a 57,000-square-foot pool deck.
The smoke-free, 24-hour casino will be the largest on the island and will have 448 slot machines and 16 table games. The hotel also will have several pools, poolside cabanas, a spa, a fitness center, four restaurants, 24-hour room service and Sheraton Club guestrooms on the penthouse level.
Other properties scheduled to open in 2010 and beyond include: the Condado Vanderbilt, slated for next summer; the Marriott Courtyard, also in the Convention Center district; the Mandarin Oriental in Humacao, which recently began construction; and the Sol Melia Club, comprising 27 timeshare units, expected to be operational by the end of 2010.
Recent expansions exceed $350 million and include La Concha, the InterContinental Hotel, Doubletree by Hilton, the Caribe Hilton, the renamed El Conquistador Waldorf Astoria Collection and the Condado Plaza, now a Conrad hotel. -- G.N.M.
The meetings and convention business in Puerto Rico has weathered the economic downturn better than most.
For fiscal year 2008-09, which ended June 30, the Puerto Rico Convention Bureau reported a 20% increase in new bookings, generating more than $20 million in new conventions and meetings business for the destination.
The bookings represented a total of 264,156 room nights, according to Ana Maria Viscasillas, PRCB president and CEO.
A one-day workers' strike on Oct. 15 in San Juan -- which was a peaceful, nonviolent work stoppage by all reports -- caused nary a blip on the radar of the city's meetings and convention business.
"We experienced no repercussions at all from the strike," Viscasillas said. "Our business continues to hold strong with $126 million worth of business on the books through next June. We are confident in predicting that the 2009-10 fiscal year will be even better than the last fiscal year."
More than 50,000 workers gathered on strike day at the Plaza Las Americas, the largest shopping mall in the Caribbean, to protest government budget cuts that will eliminate 17,000 public-sector employees, including schoolteachers, health care workers and others as a means of closing Puerto Rico's $3.2 million budget gap.
The first round of public-sector job cuts is expected to take place Nov. 6. Puerto Rico's unemployment rate already was 15.8% in August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The U.S. unemployment rate was 9.5% in September.
While the strike clogged traffic in the heart of the city, disrupted surface transportation and required some hotels and resorts to find alternate means for their arriving and departing guests when taxis were unable to reach the hotels, the protest did not close San Juan's airports or delay cruise sailings.
The PRCB will host the Latin American Congress of Pediatricians in November, welcoming more than 2,500 participants to the conference, Viscasillas said. Several equally large conventions are on the books for this winter and beyond.
Just a week after the workers' one-day strike, the bureau conducted six site inspections in five days, with three meetings planners booking with the PRCB on the spot once the inspections were concluded.
Site inspections include detailed and focused itineraries tailored by the PRCB to reflect the requirements of the meetings planners and their clients. The inspections, of which about 150 are conducted a year, include tours of the convention center, which opened in November 2005; hotels that are equipped to handle large blocs of delegates; and visits to event sites for social gatherings, off-site venues and restaurants, museums and attractions, such as the visitors center of El Yunque National Forest.
"If it is a sports conference, the planners visit stadiums and facilities. We do not downplay the traffic congestion problem in San Juan, and we don't hide the fact that there are a lot of cars here," Viscasillas said. "We use shuttle buses to get delegates around the city, and we coordinate every function with the police so they can control traffic."
San Juan is a business destination that "happens to be in the Caribbean. This is our message and what we endeavor to educate our clients about," Viscasillas said.
"Selling a destination has turned into a marketing war of sorts," she said. "We must be ready with all the ammunition available from pricing, product customizing and new ideas to secure business. We are not leaving anything to chance, and we are aggressively going after every opportunity."
In the economic climate of 2009, which Viscasillas described as a "buyers' market," several associations already booked with the PRCB wanted to renegotiate their prices. "We worked with these groups and with the hotels to extend extra days at the same rate and with our island partners to include value-added incentives," she said.
"Despite negative perceptions about corporate meetings and an economic downturn unlike any other time in our history, Puerto Rico has demonstrated a strong level of resilience within the meetings marketplace," Viscasillas said.
Meetings and conventions are "here to stay to move the economy," she said. In fact, the bureau, which monitors the likelihood of meetings planners returning to San Juan for a conference, reports a return rate of 85%.
Also, 30% of those coming to San Juan for a conference arrive before the meeting and stay after the meeting has ended.
Despite a 14% budget cut and a hiring freeze this year at the PRCB, "we reprioritized duties and assignments and maximized the talents within the bureau, and we have done more with less," Viscasillas said.
