Hotel Occupancy Rate Dips to Its Lowest Point in More Than a Decade : Economy: Slump is one of several lackluster indicators for San Diego tourism recorded in January.

The average occupancy rate of San Diego County hotels dipped to 53.7% in January, the lowest level in more than a decade, as the local hospitality market continues to feel the effects of a five-year boom in local hotel construction.

The softening of the local hotel market was just one of the several lackluster tourism indicators for January released Wednesday by the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau (ConVis). Total visitors to the area declined 1.1% from the January 1989 total, visitors to the San Diego Zoo declined by 12.3% from the previous January and traffic at the Cabrillo National Monument was down nearly 20%.

Border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa were up only 0.2%, a reflection of growing disenchantment by tourists with the long lines on both the U.S. and Mexico sides of the border, ConVis vice president Al Reese said Wednesday. Air passenger arrivals were up by 3.4% from January 1989, and visitor spending increased by 3.5% from the previous year.

January’s countywide hotel occupancy rate, down from the 57.2% average for January 1989, was the lowest since ConVis began monitoring hotel occupancy in 1979, Reese said. “It’s not a very cheery picture,” he said.

The softening of the hotel market is a direct result of the addition of 11,000 hotel rooms, a 37% increase, to the countywide hotel room inventory since the end of 1985, a boom that has lifted the county’s room total to more than 40,000, ConVis research manager Lynn Mohrfeld said Wednesday.

One benefit of the local glut in hotel rooms is that the resulting competition among hotel operators for guests has kept average daily room rates in the $75-per-night range over the last two years, Mohrfeld said.

Downtown San Diego in particular has witnessed a spate of hotel building, and downtown rooms tripled, from 2,500 in 1983 to 7,500 in 1989, Reese said. The new construction has been spurred by the anticipated opening of the San Diego Convention Center, which became fully operational in January.

But Ron Berger, General Manager of Marriott Suites-Symphony Towers, which opened its doors in January, was pessimistic that the convention center can by itself create enough added demand to cure the glut. That’s because the twin-tower, 1,365-room San Diego Marriott hotel next to the center can accommodate about 75% of all convention visitors.

“There’s not that much overflow for other hotels,” Berger said, whose all-suites hotel opened in January. “There are way too many hotel rooms for the amount of business coming into the area.”

Another discouraging statistic for local hoteliers was that hotel room nights sold in all of January actually declined by 0.1% from the previous year, despite the opening of the convention center, a sign that hotel room demand was flat.

Spokesmen for both the zoo and for Sea World, which saw attendence drop 11.6% in January from the same month the previous year, said six days of rain in January was the primary reason that attendance fell.

HOTEL ROOMS

Total number of hotel rooms available in San Diego County at year’s end.

YEAR TOTAL ROOMS 1985 29,600 1986 33,600 1987 34,504 1988 37,782 1989 40,605 1990 41,919 (Est.)

Source: The San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau.