A Hampton Inn & Suites and a Holiday Inn are set to be constructed on East Interstate 40, costing a combined $16 million. The hotels will cover about half the site, leaving the remaining acreage available for furture development. Hoteliers Dipak and Sangita Patel plan construction of the hotels with a restaurant and convention space on a 12.5 acre – in a market that showed strong, hail-aided occupancy in 2013.
Amarillo’s hotel market sold 1.4 million rooms in 2013, a 7.8 percent increase over 2012, said Jan Freitag, vice president of STR, a travel research firm that tracks the industry. The market experienced 3 percent and 2 percent year-over-year increases in 2012 and 2011, according to STR statistics. The average occupancy in the Amarillo market last year was 61.7 percent, a 5 percent gain over 2012, Freitag said.
“You’re selling six rooms out of 10 every night,” said Freitag. “And there are some months where it’s really, really strong. In June, (occupancy) was 82 percent; July, 75 percent; August, 72 percent. The number hotel developers pay attention to, the revenue per available room, was $43.47 – up 7.4 percent.”
The Hampton Inn will be constructed as a four-story, 89,000-square-foot property with 127 rooms. It is set to open in the first quart of 2016. Construction plans for the Holiday Inn are still being finalized, but it is set to contain about 130 rooms and a meeting room large enough to accommodate 200 people.
Construction should begin in March for the Hampton, while construction for the Holiday is set to begin in April.
