Aug. 30–Hurricane Harvey put a big asterisk beside a U.S. lodging market forecast at the Southern Lodging Summit in Memphis on Wednesday.

Hotel industry expert Jan Freitag, senior vice president, strategic development for STR, formerly Smith Travel Research, fears Harvey could wipe out a year's worth of gains in hotel room growth.

"Katrina was so strong that on a national level we saw a decline in room supply, which we've never seen before," Freitag said. "Always goes up. Always building more rooms. But the impact of Katrina was so strong, and I'm very, very curious to see what Harvey does," Freitag said.

Katrina shuttered 24 percent of Louisiana's hotel rooms for a year after the 2005 disaster, Freitag said. If Harvey's impact on Texas is comparable, "the U.S. supply number's going to decrease by 2 percent. There is a potential …that Harvey wipes out all the new rooms that we've added this year. Mathematically, not the actual rooms," he said.

STR's 2018 projections call for a 2.1 percent increase in room supply and a 2.3 increase in revenue per room.

Freitag said the forecast is "probably going to be wrong, now that Harvey…"

"I did some quick and dirty math and there's a very high likelihood that room supply in the United States is not growing as quickly as we had projected, just because of the impact on the hotel space in Texas and now unfortunately, Louisiana as well," Freitag said.

Freitag presented data on U.S. and Memphis hotel markets during an industry update sponsored by the Metropolitan Memphis Hotel Lodging Association and Pinkowski & Company at the Memphis Cook Convention Center.

He said the hurricane will send ripples through the industry as conventions relocate and efforts to rebuild flood-damaged hotels get underway.

"The big groups that have already suggested that they wanted to meet in Houston, I think they'll go to other cities. Beneficiaries could be Nashville, Orlando, Atlanta, Chicago," said Freitag, who paused before adding, "And Memphis."

"The other question is when is it going to recover. Are you going to find anybody to rebuild those hotels? Chances are mold is going to be a huge issue. We had this at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville after the flood in 2010. You basically have to rip out everything down to the studs and rebuild everything. Where are you going to find people if they can't live in the city?"

"This is just the beginning," said Freitag. "We haven't seen anything yet."