Bakersfield hotels fare better through pandemic than state, national peers

Feb. 26—Bakersfield's largest hotel has been quite fortunate despite its awful luck during the pandemic, and the same thing could be said about the entire city's lodging industry.

The 262-room Doubletree Hotel by Hilton had just finished more than a year's worth of renovations when California's stay-at-home order took effect March 19. Large-group bookings disappeared and its staff shrank from more than 100 to about 25.

But even as its brand-new bar, café and meeting space remain unused, the hotel near Highway 99 along Rosedale Highway has managed to remain open to serve construction workers assigned to the Centennial Corridor freeway project and travelers opting to drive through Bakersfield rather than book a flight.

"Right now we've just learned to shift and change our focus and just know that this is what we're going to be working with for a while," said the Doubletree's director of sales, Lori LaBare.

The nation's lodging industry has suffered badly during the pandemic and many jobs have been lost in even the strongest markets. But compared with others, Bakersfield's hotel market has fared remarkably well — and people in the business say the reasons in some cases come down to being in the right place at the right time.

LOCAL OUTPERFORMANCE

Two sets of data released by the city's tourism bureau, Visit Bakersfield, suggest local properties outperformed the state and the nation as a whole through much of 2020 and ended the year strongly in one key measure.

At the end of last year, the average price of a hotel-room stay in California and the nation remained at least 20 percent below the rates that were being charged when stay-at-home orders hit.

But in Bakersfield, prices had already recovered from the pandemic — the city's average never did hit the depths the state and national markets sank to — and, as a whole, were 5 percent higher on Dec. 31 than they were in mid-March, according to Visit Bakersfield.

The city's overall vacancy rate has also held up relatively well, even as it ended 2020 more than 15 percent below where it was when the stay-at-home orders arrived. The national average didn't catch up to Bakersfield's recovery until December, when the state's average was still lagging the city's relative occupancy by about 20 percentage points, Visit Bakersfield reported.

CONTRIBUTING FACTORS

Bureau Manager David Lyman explained a broad decline in U.S. travel has taken its hardest toll on luxury hotels serving conventions and airports, while cities like Bakersfield located near major driving corridors have escaped the brunt of the damage.

He said the citywide hotel occupancy rate has also benefited from restricted inventory as half a dozen local properties have been converted to long-term housing. Meanwhile, he added, four hotels recently proposed to be built in Bakersfield appear to have been put on hold, which he said was no surprise because of pandemic pressures facing the industry.

Denise Connor, director of sales at the Home2 Suites by Hilton, said her hotel along Brimhall Road was blessed to have kept its occupancy rate in the double digits during the pandemic. It lost whole blocks of room bookings, she said, but not to the extent properties that serve convention business did.

Other lucky circumstances intervened: As a brand-new hotel the Home2 Suites attracted guests who thought older properties might not be as clean, she said.

BOOKING TRENDS

Plus, business travelers were urged by their bosses to extend their stays through the weekend rather than risk travel to home and back, she said, and corporations were booking single-occupancy rooms during the pandemic instead of doubling up as they had in the past.

On top of that, local residents have been booking overnighters just for a "change of scenery," Connor said. She added that, like the Doubletree, the Home2 Suites has benefited from local construction and other work projects during the pandemic.

The hotel has also experienced a jump in extended stays by traveling nurses and local residents whose homes sold faster than expected, Connor said. Suddenly they found themselves waiting as long as a month for escrow to close on their new home.

She said people on their way to Las Vegas, Yosemite or the Bay Area have also provided a nice bump for hotels in Bakersfield.

"It's kind of like the stopping point for a lot of things," she said.