Dover hotels are getting a pleasant surprise this January with a spike in hotel occupancy surrounding the presidential inauguration.
Historically a slow time of the year for the hotel industry, the dismal economy and a glut of rooms in the Dover area have resulted in persistent vacancies.
“Occupancy is down in the country and occupancy is really down in Delaware, especially Kent County,” said Dover hotel owner Tom Kramedas, whose businesses include the Sheraton Dover Hotel, Hampton Inn, Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn Express and Sleep Inn.
He welcomes this year’s upsurge in mid-January occupancy rates.
“I didn’t see it coming because it didn’t happen four years ago with Bush,” he said. “One of my managers called me and said, ‘I just got an interesting call from a group in Indiana,’ the day after Obama got elected.
“So I went online that night and saw that there was not a room anywhere in Washington.”
Cindy Price, general manager for the Hampton Inn, said Jan. 20 is completely booked this year. She said groups from Florida and New York reserved the rooms back in November, following the election results proclaiming Barack Obama as president.
The story’s the same at the Delaware Capital Inn — formerly Howard Johnson’s — where General Manager Tom Manley said they are just about full from Jan. 19 to 21.
“I think everything’s pretty much booked from here to Philadelphia,” he said. “As soon as the [inauguration] date was set, we got a ton of emails and phone calls.”
At the Sheraton Dover Hotel, General Manager Victor Schimp is confident they will be booked for the inauguration.
“We have people calling directly and others going through central booking,” he said. Most people are coming from the eastern seaboard but they have some traveling from Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.
“It’s a nice thing to happen because the winter months tend to be slow,” Schimp said.
At the recently opened Hilton Garden Inn in north Dover, General Manager Roger Weber said rooms are 75% booked for the two days prior to Jan. 20 and inauguration day itself. People started calling a month ago, some coming in from Ohio, he said.
The area’s newest hotel was supposed to be finished in August but Weber said construction delays pushed back its opening to Dec. 5. The typically slow time of year has been compounded by the dismal economy.
“We opened at a slow period of time so we weren’t expecting high occupancy rates,” he said.
