San Francisco Dethrones Geneva as City With the World’s Most Expensive Hotels
Jennifer Billock July 02, 2015
Move over, Switzerland; this California city has just taken your place for the priciest hotel stay in the world.
The tech industry boom in San Francisco is doing more than just raising real estate costs; it’s also now made the city the costliest in the world to stay overnight. In the past year, the average cost of a single night at a hotel in the Golden Gate city rose by 88 percent, according to an index compiled by Bloomberg, to a whopping $397 per night. That puts it above even Geneva, Switzerland, for high room rates. In fact, Geneva is more than $100 cheaper a night, at $292.
According to Bloomberg, the cost for San Francisco hotel rooms has catapulted so high due to a combination of factors: the job market is still on the rise and hotel construction is being neglected in favor of more housing. It’s also due in part to Millennial travelers.
Below are the top 10 of the world’s most expensive cities to spend the night in:
“The influx of tech companies into San Francisco has been tremendous, and with it this new emerging traveler, this millennial traveler, who is looking for downtown experiences,” Chuck Pacioni, the San Francisco Marriott Marquis’ general manager, told Bloomberg. “Many of them may travel for work to Silicon Valley, but instead of staying at a suburban hotel, they want to stay in the city for the culture and the experiences.”
That cost increase doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon, either. Population in the city continues to rise, having gone up 5.9 percent in the last four years alone.
[Photo: iStock]
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Really? No London, England on this list?
I'm raising the BS flag on this one. I was pricing Hilton and Marriott in San Fran a month or so ago and they weren't noticeably more expensive than any other large city in the US. I don't know who writes this crap, but I've seen some majorly skewed "statistics" come up on these Flyertalk linked blogs.
Others have pointed out elsewhere that there is a fatal flaw in this comparison that puts San Francisco at a huge disadvantage - the measurement week is February 1-10 2016. The Super Bowl is on February 7, in Santa Clara, just south of San Francisco.
There are cities, though, not metropolitan areas, nor city centers. So the numbers for San Francisco are in part higher because so little of the San Francisco area is San Francisco itself. Hotels are always more expensive in city centers, and there's more city center in San Francisco than there is, say, in Los Angeles, which is very spread out, and the hotels in some non-center areas of Los Angeles mitigate the cost of the hotels in the Los Angeles city centers. If the statistics were only for hotels close to the city center, the list of cities therefore might in quite a different order. And don't most travelers care about the cost either of a hotel in the part of the city they want to stay in, or else somewhere in the area that includes not just the city?