The county led the way in the state with 2,049 new rooms opening in six area hotels last year. | Photo courtesy of Hilton Hotels

San Diego County added more hotel rooms than any other county in the state last year, and analysts say that even though development is slowing, it will start back up when the economy improves.

According to a report by Atlas Hospitality Group, an Irvine-based hotel broker, 2,049 new rooms opened in six hotels here last year, a 96 percent hike from 1,143 rooms in five hotels in 2007. The largest property to open in 2008 was the 1,190-room Hilton San Diego Bayfront.

Last year, the state saw an 81 percent hike in new rooms for a record 10,286. San Diego led the way with 20 percent of the action.

At any other time that might be something to brag about, but not now.

Abundance Of Rooms

“With the economic fallout from the recession, there is probably no worse time for California to have a record number of new hotel rooms entering the market,” said Alan Reay, the report’s author. “Obviously, all those new hotels were planned during the boom years of 2005 to 2007. Unfortunately, they opened in what many are calling the most difficult economic climate in living memory.”

Since 2005, the state has added 24,000 new rooms, and as before, San Diego led other counties with 17 percent of that total.

Why?

As Bob Kaplan, an executive at Los Angeles-based PKF Capital pointed out, San Diego has “all the generators that drive hotel occupancy.” That includes corporate and group business, leisure tourism and good weather. Even if those categories aren’t performing as well as in the past, he’s optimistic that they’ll rebound.

“If you take the band of time from September to now, you might say, ‘Wow everybody has to stop. Let’s go look at Costa Rica,’ ” he said. “But you don’t. You look at historic demand over a longer period, and that’s been good in San Diego.”

Meanwhile, there were 12,500 rooms in the planning stages here last year, down 18 percent from 2007, Atlas Hospitality’s report showed. As a rule, only 10 percent go beyond the drawing boards, yet that’s still higher than any other county.

Development Curve

Hotel development always reflects economic conditions, said Jerry Morrison, a La Jolla lodging industry analyst.