As leisure and business travel continues to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic and hotel rates rise to meet the demand, a local hotel management company is preparing to expand its footprint with six new hotel openings this year.

Twenty Four Seven Hotels took a heavy hit in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when corporate and leisure travel virtually ground to a halt. But the Newport-Beach-based business has since seen a vast improvement, according to CEO David Wani.

“We have a handful of hotels that actually did better in 2021 than in 2019,” he said.

Twenty Four Seven’s year-to-date occupancy rate has averaged 68%, Wani said, and March is projected to average 75%. The upscale hotels handle a mixture of leisure and business travelers.

“Last spring people who were vaccinated just wanted to get out and travel because they’d been trapped in their houses,” he said. “We’re also starting to see corporate business travel coming back, and inflationary factors have allowed us to drive rates higher as market demand increases.”

The company — which manages 25 hotels throughout the Western U.S. in such cities as Calabasas, El Segundo, Temecula, Anaheim and Santa Barbara — will be handling hotel operations at the following new locations:

Hampton Inn & Suites in Rancho Cucamonga: Scheduled for May

Hampton Inn & Suites in Marina (north of Monterey): Scheduled for summer

Hyatt House in Sacramento: Scheduled for summer

Hyatt Place in Newark (north of San Jose): Scheduled for summer

Holiday Inn Express in Chino Hills: Scheduled for fall

Hampton Inn & Suites in Diamond Bar: Scheduled for late 2022 or early 2023

Twenty Four Seven Hotels also manages the Hilton Garden Inn in Temecula. (Photo courtesy of Twenty Four Seven Hotels)

Wani said those opening dates are subject to supply chain disruptions, which can be unpredictable.

“If a delivery of supplies runs late, that could bump an opening date by 60 to 90 days,” he said. “A Garden Inn in Temecula just opened, but it was originally planned to open in November of last year.”

A leisure-driven recovery

Emmy Hise, CoStar Group‘s senior director of hospitality analytics for the Western U.S., said the industry’s recovery is being driven largely by leisure travelers.

“They’re calling it revenge travel,” she said. “People want to get out, and sometimes they’re opting for higher-end hotels than that might have before because they’ve been cooped up for so long.”

Hise said average daily hotel rates in most markets have already surpassed pre-pandemic levels. She attributes that partly to inflation, but also to the fact that hotels have had to hire more workers to handle the uptick in business — a cost that gets passed along to guests.

“Hotels in beach areas like San Diego, Dana Point and Santa Barbara are recovering the fastest because they have lots of leisure activities,” she said. “People are looking for those kinds of experiences.”

Twenty Four Seven handles all aspects of hotel management, ranging from human resources and accounting to revenue management, digital marketing and day-to-day operations.

“The 2021 transaction market for hotels got back to 2018 and 2019 levels,” Wani said. “We expect that to continue in 2022 and 2023 with new hotel development. We’re looking to expand our portfolio to about 50 hotels. If we perform well, investors are motivated to say, ‘hey, these guys are doing well — let’s invest in another hotel.’ “