It only makes sense, perhaps, that hotel demand in Huntsville far exceeds hotel supply these days.

After all, you may have heard that Huntsville is growing and adding jobs and just generally cramming more people into its city limits seemingly by the day.

At the same time, maybe it only makes sense to hear about the latest new hotel announcement and wonder if all those rooms are really necessary.

Just in downtown, for instance, one new hotel opened this week and three more have announced plans to begin construction later this year. And the announcement of a fourth hotel is anticipated in the summer.

Should all this demand be a surprise to people in Huntsville?

"I don’t think you should be surprised," said Shane Davis, the city's director of urban and economic development. "If you start to put all the pieces together, 36,000 new jobs, those jobs come with brand new corporations coming into our community, which have people who do business with them. And then just the start-up jobs and the travel in sports and the investments we've made in our parks and rec and the amount of tournaments we're getting and new conferences that are coming."

And the list goes on.

“Huntsville is the most visited city in the state as far as tourists with the U.S. Space & Rocket Center being the No. 1 tourist attraction,” said Judy Ryals, president and CEO of the Huntsville/Madison County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “From a tourism standpoint, we’re very strong. The (Huntsville) Botanical Garden also in the top 10 (No. 3) along with the Robert Trent Jones golf trail. That helps drive traffic here. We’ve seen a real increase in our number of international visitors and a lot of them stay longer.”

So what does hotel demand look like?

Room occupancy in Huntsville is up more than 10 percent over last year through the first four months of the 2019 fiscal year, according to data supplied by the CVB. Even with the partial federal government shutdown in January, room occupancy rose 7.3 percent in January.

Should occupancy remain at 10 percent for the year, more than 1.5 million hotel rooms will be occupied in Huntsville in a city that currently has 5,633 rooms.

So far in fiscal year 2019, hotel occupancy in downtown Huntsville alone has been 78.3 percent, according to data from the CVB. That compares to 68.6 percent occupancy in Birmingham, 67.9 percent in Montgomery and 60.9 percent in Mobile.

In summary, hotel rooms are in demand in Huntsville perhaps more than anywhere else in the state. From youth sports events to conventions to tourists to business travelers to unusual events such as an upcoming cornhole tournament at Campus 805, people need a place to lay their head at night.

"Sometimes you have to stop and think and put all the pieces together and see the full picture," Davis said. "But it's not surprising and I think you'll see more."

Amid this seemingly mad dash to build one hotel after another, particularly downtown, there is a larger strategy in play.

To expand the portfolio of conventions at the Von Braun Center, Ryals said about 1,000 committable hotel rooms are needed within walking distance. A hotel, she said, won't be able to promise 100 percent of their rooms for convention goers.

That's a step beyond simply having 1,000 hotel rooms within close proximity to Huntsville's convention center.

And there is no exact number of hotel rooms altogether to capture that 1,000 committable rooms, Ryals said. Maybe 1,500 total rooms would be enough, maybe not quite that many.

But for now, Ryals said there are only about 360 committable rooms near the VBC – a number that rises above 400 now that the 120-room AC Hotel by Marriott opened earlier this week.

"We're wanting at least 800 to 1,000 committable rooms," she said.

Why does it matter? Ryals said that a recent convention at the VBC had delegates spread across town in 14 different hotels.

"We're trying to get them closer to downtown and us not provide that shuttle system that costs additional dollars," she said. "And other cities are going after some of the conferences that we have on an annual basis, trying to get to their city. They may be able to an offer a better package deal with more rooms within walking distance of the meeting facility. We're trying to make it easy for them and offset some of their cost by offering some subsidy for their transportation rooms."

And while Huntsville is trying to protect what it has, it's also pursuing new events itself.

"The Gridiron Men's Conference is something we're going after," Ryals said. "It's currently being held in Birmingham but due to all their interstate construction, they are looking at possibly bringing that to Huntsville. And once they came on a site tour, they said that they may want to move it here and keep it here. There is a lot of business out there that we're going after."

But conversations often begin, and maybe sometimes end, when it comes to available hotel rooms nearby.

“There are some big conferences looking at Huntsville,” Ryals said. “We’re at least on the radar.”