Hotel Association of NYC Urges City to Take Action as Excelsior + Murray Hill Hotels Close

Industry Struggling to Recover from Pandemic Faces High Property Taxes + Unprecedented 'Severance Law'

NEW YORK, NY (01/10/2022) (readMedia)-- HANYC (the Hotel Association of NYC) today urged New York City lawmakers to take action as Excelsior and Murray Hill Hotels closed their doors in the last two weeks. The hotels will be converted to high-end residential and transitional housing, respectively. The already struggling hotel industry faces a property tax burden that is double other major U.S. markets, as a new report from HANYC shows. That's on top of a bill passed by former Mayor de Blasio called the "Severance Law," which requires shuttered hotels to pay severance beyond the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars already paid out by the industry during the pandemic.

"New York's hotel industry has been arguably one of the hardest hit by COVID-19, and now the omicron variant threatens to hold our recovery back even further. Now with the closing of Excelsior and Murray Hill, we're seeing the effects of bad policy that targeted an industry and risked hundreds of jobs for a cheap headline. The City with a new class of lawmakers should be doing everything to help hotels and the tourism industry get back on its feet. The City must suspend the penalties on late payments for property taxes, which accrue at an exorbitant rate, and overturn the poorly crafted Severance Law before we lose more hotels," said Vijay Dandapani, President and CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City.

In December, of the 2,500 hotel properties across the U.S. surveyed by the Business Journals, one in five had been reappraised since COVID-19's initial spread in early 2020. The surveyed hotels in New York saw an even steeper drop in property values, with some hotels losing more than 60 percent in property value.

More than 200 New York hotels closed during the pandemic – and of those only 100 have come back to full-time operation – leaving tens-of-thousands of New Yorkers out of work. Before the pandemic, the hotel industry employed more than 50,000 people who are mostly immigrants and people of color, raised $3.2 billion a year in City tax revenue, and added $22 billion annually to our economy.

About HANYC

The Hotel Association of New York City (HANYC) is the oldest hotel association in the United States and one of the oldest trade associations in the nation. The Association is an internationally recognized leader in New York City's $5 billion tourism industry and represents nearly 300 hotels, which, together, employ approximately 50,000 employees. The Association advocates on behalf of its members in a variety of legislative areas and sets standards for training, best practices and cooperative initiatives with key New York City stakeholders.