Almost 10,000 Hotels Are in the Works in the US and China Alone

Earlier this year, the World Travel and Tourism Council declared an uptick in the amount of travel spending taking place around the globe. This included data that spending for this year was nearing the peak amount previously set in 2019 and that employment in the industry was on the rise. If more and more people are traveling, it stands to reason that they’re going to need places to stay — something indicative of recent business moves like Marriott’s partnership with Sonder.

But there’s also the matter of new hotels being built. And when it comes to projects in the works, two countries lead the rest of the world by a substantial margin: the United States and China, with 6,095 and 3,815 hotels, respectively. That’s one of the biggest takeaways from a new set of data released by Lodging Econometrics earlier this week. Hotel projects in the two countries represent 64% of new hotels in the pipeline around the world.

India, Canada and Saudi Arabia round out the top five, though none of these countries has more than 1,000 projects in the works. Recent data on the hospitality industry has shown a boom time for luxury and upscale hotels, and this overview of projects in the pipeline echoes that. According to Lodging Econometrics, “[u]pper midscale, upscale and the midscale chain scales” represent 65% of all projects in the works as of the second quarter of 2024.

Industry Data Shows Good News for Luxury Hotels

The news for budget hotels is less cheery

As Kathakali Nandi notes at Hotels, the number of hotel projects in the works represents “an all-time high in the second quarter.” Both the total number of hotel projects and the number of rooms in those projects are also up year over year compared with 2023. And with a growing number of cities around the world cracking down on businesses like Airbnb, it’ll be interesting to see what effect this has on hotel construction trends in the coming years.