Sept. 03–News Dickinson,North Dakota
Andrew Haffner
The Dickinson Press
Dickinson hotels, at 50 percent occupancy, feel sting of Bakken oilfield slowdown
Dickinson North Dakota 1815 1st Street West 58602
The days when travelers in Dickinson could find no room at the inn may be over, for now.
Terri Thiel, director of the Dickinson Convention and Visitors Bureau, said there has “been an opening” for hotel rooms throughout the city, with occupancy rates sitting at 50 percent, according to Smith Travel Report, and an average daily rate for a room at about $107 as of the end of July, the most current month for data.
Occupancy rates are down 17 percent from the same point last year, a trend which Thiel attributed to a few factors.
“There has been a slowdown in some of the room occupancy because of the energy industry, where some of those workers were coming in,” she said. “Then, along with that, we’ve had additional rooms that have been put online the last few years.”
Dickinson’s standing total number of hotel rooms is now 1,713, up 688 rooms from this time in 2011 and 461 from the same point in 2012.
Those two years saw peak occupancy numbers and the highest average daily room rate, respectively.
Year-to-date room occupancy in 2011 was at 95 percent, with a year-end rate of 88 percent.
At that same point in 2012 the average daily rate was $126.62, a little more than 19 dollars higher than it is now, though she said only data had only been provided for 950 of the total 1,252 rooms.
Thiel said occupancy rates began to drop off in 2013 with a year-end rate of 64 percent, though she said many workers were being relocated to different housing options in that time.
She added that occupancy rates did rise to 71.5 percent by year-end 2014.
Comfort Inn General Manager Bonnie Goldsberry said she believed Dickinson businesses in general were experiencing “minimization” from the oil slowdown, hospitality being no exception.
“Our industry is changing, every industry is changing in our area because of the decline … in the oil activity,” she said, later adding that rates at the hotel had decreased.
“Everyone has adjusted rates in accordance to what’s happening in our community.”
Elaine Myran, general manager of the Ramada Grand Dakota Hotel, also said room rates are down at her establishment, which she described as “not 100 percent full.”
The increase in room availability gave the Ramada “more opportunity to host larger events,” she said.
“We’re starting to see … travelers coming through and families, and are able to capture other market segments, such as the weddings coming in.”
Leisure travelers made up for less of the total number of guests in times of peak occupancy, she said, though she added the currently higher numbers of rooms should serve to keep rates competitive and open market segments “other than oil.”
Thiel described the slowdown and the city’s increased hotel availability as having “created more of an opportunity than anything.”
“We obviously have got great products now — with growth comes new things and new properties and our old ones are continuing to upgrade,” she said. ” … Our Badlands are still beautiful and the city has added so many amenities to it that it didn’t have previously.”
However, she said the ultimate effect of the decline in occupancy is that “everybody here probably has to work a little harder for business,” especially as the year draws into the leisure travel offseason.
Thiel said this may include using marketing plans that follow the North Dakota Tourism Division, as the Convention and Visitors Bureau does, or creating package deals that make use of partnerships with other local businesses.
