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In North Charleston there’s room for the inns
By Shelia Watson
Contributing Writer
Seven new hotels are planned for North Charleston this year, increasing the number of rooms by about 27%. When the hotels are completed, the city will have 26 hotels with a total of 3,310 rooms. The city’s count of hotels does not include motels.
Most of the hotels are going up near the convention center complex. They include the 74-room Baymont Inn & Suites, the 125-room Candlewood Suites, the 57-room Country Inn & Suites, the 86-room Holiday Inn Express and three 121-room Value Inn Hotels. The city’s building department was not able to provide cost estimates of construction.
“There’s an element of competition with the other areas, and yet we’re all marketing the whole region,” said Bill Gore, director of North Charleston’s planning department. “Choosing a hotel in North Charleston may be a way for a family to economize the experience and take in more of the region instead of spending so much on the accommodation.
“I think you’ll probably see families enjoying the ability to comparison-shop the more expensive venues in the downtown area. Downtown gives the visitor proximity to historic attractions and ambiance versus the north area’s newer, sometimes more affordable and centrally located hotel experience, where they can get to various parts of the region with relative ease via the interstate system and still be close to the airport.”
Although seven new hotels under construction would indicate rapid growth, the hotel market is not reaching saturation in the area, Gore said.
“Saturation would be the point when you have a large number of rooms for which there’s no demand for a long period of time,” he said. “That’s when the facilities would begin to appear not viable.”
The opposite is true, he insisted.
“We have an emerging hotel district south of the airport and also one that’s north and east,” Gore said. “Both the city (of North Charleston) and Charleston County have positioned the convention center and the coliseum as a central point for visitors.
“It’s a fairly natural pattern of development that a convention center would attract hotels,” he said. “And the local governments, both city and county, have acted jointly to facilitate further hotel development in the midst of that. If nothing else, the people who read the marketing reports believe this is a good market for hotel space. And the tourism industry is a major reason that would hold true.”
Gore said hotels are “a very desirable type of development. Those facilities provide quite a supply of jobs, first for construction and then for hospitality. And all that brings revenue to the city.”
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