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Portland hotel boom increasing city's rooms by 40 percent



If online home-sharing services like Airbnb are threatening the hotel industry, you wouldn't know it in Portland.

Not to be left out of Portland's building boom, hotels are responsible for a good chunk of the tower cranes now dotting the downtown skyline. Institutional investors and developers have taken advantage of low interest rates and high occupancy levels at Portland's existing hotels, betting on Portland's ongoing emergence as a travel destination and the region's booming economy.

The number of hotel rooms in the metro area is set to explode in the coming years. The hospitality industry group Travel Portland projects that in central Portland alone, there will be at least 40 percent more available rooms by 2020 than there are now. Nearly 3,000 new rooms are in the development pipeline or have recently opened, not including projects still in the early planning phases. There are currently more than 7,300 rooms in the central city.

...continues at the Oregonian.