Yeesh, had a lot more to say about this than I thought I did. I just... I don't understand this sentiment, this open hostility towards the hotel.
The Universal Hilton has been trying to expand since 2017, pretty much immediately after Potter opened. Clearly, they saw that there would be rising demand and they wanted to be able to meet the future need for hotel capacity. Universal capitalizing on that growing need by building a hotel of their own, so they can profit directly from the attendance that they clearly want to grow, really doesn't seem like a bad idea.
But let's look at some numbers. According to
AECOM and the Themed Entertainment Association, they estimated USH's attendance to be over nine million people in both 2018 and 2019 (i.e. post-Potter, but pre-Nintendo). How many of those do you think are locals? A third? 50%? If we were exceedingly generous and said that a whopping 75% of the park visitors in 2019 were one-day locals who would not need a hotel room, that still leaves more then two million people who need a hotel room to visit the park even for a single day, whether they're traveling from upstate, out of state, or internationally. The Hilton and the Sheraton have about 950 rooms between them. Even if every single one of those rooms had four people in it every single night for the entire year, that would still only serve about 60% of, again, that exceedingly low estimate of hotel demand for USH. To say that a new hotel won't be used is just
patently incorrect. Right now, the only way to experience SNW is to either come to USH or to fly to Japan. Not arguing about which one is better, but those are literally the only two options. Do you really think that people won't come to Los Angeles
specifically to go to SNW?
And, also, I feel like people are acting as if this hotel is gonna open next week. There may not be anything new opening in 2024, but who says that the hotel will open in 2024? Or 2025, even? It'll take years to clear out whatever is currently on the site of the hotel, then build it, then furnish it, then staff it, then open it. The rest of the park will continue to progress and grow and, yes, they'll iron out as many of the kinks with SNW as they possibly can. Barring another global catastrophe, I have no doubt that the hotel demand will be even
higher by the time they start taking reservations for it, especially if there's, say, oh, I don't know, a sudden influx of international tourists into Los Angeles five years from now. Why wait? Why miss out on that window, on that
money by delaying the construction of the hotel? If you think that it'll be a few years before the demand will be there for a hotel, then they really
should start building it now so that it can be ready when that demand comes. Whatever happened to "If you build it, they will come?"
Also,
also, more than one thing can be under construction at the same time! The construction of Pets and SNW overlapped
heavily and, nobody was reacted by saying "Well, they really ought to get the Pets Virtual Queue working more consistently before they start doing something like SNW!" What a wild idea to think that, just because they're building a hotel on the other side of the property, they're not, at the same time, also trying to resolve the technical issues they've been having with MK and the Power-Up Bands. Those are the responsibility of entirely different teams. All of the speculated locations that I've seen so far (regardless of how plasible I think those speculations are) are far enough away from the actual park to pretty much make them useless for future theme park expansion anyway, so it's not like it's taking up a spot that could go to another ride or land or whatever.
To make a long essay short, USH is going to need more hotel capacity as the park continues to grow and, even if you think it's not there now, waiting to begin construction until that demand
is there is a bad idea because it'll put them behind the ball. Just because they're building a hotel doesn't mean that they aren't doing other things and, as some people have pointed out, it's a good sign that they fully intend to continue to expand what the park has to offer to make a hotel stay even more valuable. This should be exciting!
