Mobile Press Register reports that the Mobile hotel industry is booming. Mobile has no beach. Yet a Press-Register analysis of city lodging tax records shows that people spent more than $101 million on hotels in the city and its police jurisdiction between May 1, 2007 and April 30, 2008.
That’s up from about $82 million the prior year, and only a bit below the record $105 million from the year before, when Hurricane Katrina-related workers and refugees packed rooms all around Mobile County.
The rebuilding of hotels on Pensacola Beach has been delayed while owners figured out how to get around the leases and build condos instead. They came up with the condo-hotel concept and finally got the county commission to buy into it. A year later the condo market collapses and they are now wishing they had just built the hotels.
Many of the old hotels around University Mall have last their “flags” and are in the process of being re-branded as lesser quality hotels. Highway 29 boomed with the Pensacola Soccer Complex was active in the 1990s. Now those hotels are run down.
Highpointe has built some great hotels near the airport and on Gregory St, but the others are falling apart.
I don’t think there is any hotel on Perdido Key.