By Ken Alltucker
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Despite weak convention business and the lingering effect of an economic boycott, a new report shows that Greater Cincinnati hotels last year enjoyed a slight bump in occupancy rates andbookings.

Yet the report also shows that the bookings came at a price for hoteliers who were forced to trim rates almost 2 percent to lure guests. Furthermore, Cincinnati's hotel rooms are empty more often than incompeting Midwestern cities such as Columbus and Indianapolis, even though room rates here are the lowest in the region.

Area hotels booked almost 100,000 more rooms in 2002 than the year before. That helped boost the region's average hotel occupancy rate to 51.7 percent last year from 50.1 percent in 2001, according to Hendersonville, Tenn.-based Smith Travel Research.

Hotel managers say the figures underscore the need to step up convention and tourism efforts to offset the region's hospitality woes stemming from the boycott and drop-off in business travel because of the economy.

"It was a tough year in 2002," said Rob Gauthier, general manager of the Millennium Hotel in downtown Cincinnati. "It's going to be a dogfight and a struggle for 2003 as well."

The Smith Travel report showed that downtown hotels struggled the most to fill empty rooms with an average occupancy rate of 49.3 percent. Northern Kentucky hotels (52.6 percent) and northern suburban hotels (53.8 percent) fared better.

The higher occupancy rate in the northern suburbs was partly due to diminishing supply. The 350-room Radisson Hotel Cincinnati in Sharonville closed at the end of October and more than 100 full- and part-time employees were laid off. So despite the better occupancy rate, the total number of hotel room bookings in the Sharonville, West Chester, Blue Ash and the Mason/Deerfield Township area declined, less than 1 percent - the only area locally with a drop in hotel-room nights (one room occupied one night).

Dan Fay, president of Commonwealth Hotels in Covington, said suburban hoteliers expect a difficult 2003, too.

Many hoteliers are looking to the Greater Cincinnati Convention and Visitors Bureau to improve prospects for the region's $3.4 billion travel and tourism industry, which employs more than 81,000.

At its annual meeting today, the bureau will release a report that shows fewer conventions and business meetings came to Cincinnati in 2002, resulting in a 7 percent drop in hotel bookings from those meetings. And even though the bureau signed another 149 meetings in 2002 that will generate 237,013 future hotel room nights, several competing cities such as Columbus and Indianapolis fared better.

Yet the bureau's tourism blitz helped offset some of the convention woes. The bureau generated 339,686 room nights in 2002 with tourist events such as a summer and winter marketing campaign offering discounted hotel room nights; sporting events; special promotions; and billboard ads in Columbus, Louisville and Indianapolis, said bureau spokeswoman Julie Harrison Calvert.

Gauthier said a major test for the health of Cincinnati's convention business is how well the city navigates the expansion of the Albert B. Sabin Cincinnati Convention Center, to be completed in 2006. The $160 million convention center expansion is seen as a key part of a plan to make Cincinnati a more competitive destination.

"We need to draw business from other regions," Fay said.

E-mail kalltucker@enquirer.com