July 20, 2015
Kathy Willens/AP
The Sophie Tucker room is one of 22 rooms in the Blue Moon Hotel, on Orchard Street in New York, Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008. The boutique hotel is located in an 1879 building that has been painstakingly restored.
The pope hasn't even shown up yet, but the city's hotels have already broken a record: occupation rates reached a record-breaking high in June, with all but 10 percent of rooms booked.
Naturally, daily hotel room rates also reached a record high, at $212.95 on average.
Philadelphia hotels booked 89.4 percent of their rooms last month, the Philadelphia Business Journal reports, the highest rate since hotel research firm STR starting recording the information in 1993.
The previous record stood since October 1998, when hotel occupancy rates reached 89.2 percent. At the time, however, there were 7,100 hotel rooms available in Philly, compared with the more than 11,000 rooms today.
"June was the strongest month in over 20 years for which we have records, both in terms of occupancy and average room rate," said Peter Tyson, vice president of PKF Consulting.
This is a huge improvement over last June, when the hotel occupancy rate was just 81 percent. The average room rate was $174.83.
The reason for the difference: conventions. Convention-goers booked about a third of the city's hotel business, more than 97,000 hotel rooms.
Philly hosted three big groups last month: the Government Finance Officers Association, the Biotechnology Industrial Organization and the International Society for Technology in Education.
