It was only a decade ago that downtown Detroit hoteliers were struggling to fill not even half of all their empty rooms.

Today, hotel occupancy and nightly rates in downtown are at near-record highs and greater downtown is in the middle of a building boom of small and midsize boutique hotels.

Industry insiders contend that all the building activity does not reflect any bubble, but rather the strong unmet demand for more hotel rooms in Detroit.

So many new hotel projects have recently opened or been announced that the hospitality business is facing a different challenge: keeping track of all the new Detroit hotels.

"The hotel business in metropolitan Detroit, particularly in downtown, is doing extraordinarily well," said Michael O'Callaghan, executive vice president of the Detroit Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. "It's probably the best of times — certainly in my lifetime."

The average hotel occupancy rate in downtown Detroit last year was 69.7% and the nightly rate was $171, according to the convention and visitors bureau. Those were better numbers than the region-wide averages of 67.8 % and $106. (The nightly rates do not include room taxes, which generally vary from 12-15% in downtown.)

In 2009, the occupancy rate at downtown hotels was well below 50%, even with fewer rooms available than today, O'Callaghan said.

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“In years past, the (suburban hotels) would fill up first, and then people would trickle into downtown Detroit," he said. “In the last five or six years, that has completely flipped around where the compression starts in downtown Detroit and then goes out to the suburbs.

“Many times, a person's first choice is to stay downtown. So it really has changed quite a bit," he said.

On the radar nationally

Several of Detroit's new hotels opened to national acclaim, including the 129-room upscale Shinola Hotel, which slept its first guests in January and is situated inside a row of redeveloped downtown buildings on Woodward, including a former wig shop.

Other celebrated arrivals include the 106-room Siren Hotel at 1509 Broadway, which filled the vacant Wurlitzer Building, and The Element at the Metropolitan, which opened its 110 rooms this year at 33 John R, inside a once-blighted 14-story building that used to have trees growing on the roof.

Even the Detroit Club, long a private members-only clubhouse, got into the hotel business last year with 10 newly renovated boutique suites that are available to non-members for the first time.

More rooms will bring more conventions

To attract more conventions and special events such as the Final Four, Detroit needs a second large-scale hotel that would complement the 1,328-room Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, according to O'Callaghan of the convention and visitors bureau.

Boutique hotels are generally too small and expensive for large groups of conventioneers looking to visit the city.

Some groups did stay at the 773-room Edward Hotel & Convention Center in Dearborn, formerly known as the Hyatt Regency, and then shuttle over to downtown Detroit, but that giant hotel abruptly closed in December following a disastrous city inspection that found the building "unfit for human occupancy."

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"So even with the exciting news about the boutique hotels being built, for a city like this to be really competitive in the convention business, you need to have at least 10,000 hotel rooms in the central business district," O'Callaghan said of Detroit. "So we’re about 4,000 rooms short.”

Even though the number of Airbnb listings in the Detroit area is increasing, O'Callaghan said that those home-sharing arrangements account for less than 5% of the region's total overnight room inventory.

The new hotels that are open are:

The Shinola Hotel

The Shinola opened in January at 1400 Woodward Ave. It is an upscale boutique hotel with 129 rooms in 50 different configurations. The building also features several new restaurants, bars and cafes.

The Element at the Metropolitan

The Element is an extended-stay hotel that opened in January at 33 John R. It has 110 rooms.

The Siren Hotel

The Siren opened in March 2018 at 1509 Broadway. It has 106 rooms and a popular bar called the Candy Bar, which Architectural Digest named the "most beautifully designed bar" in Michigan.

The Detroit Foundation Hotel

The Foundation Hotel opened in 2017 inside a former fire house across from Cobo Center and is still winning design accolades for its Apparatus Room restaurant. The hotel at 260 Larned St. has 100 rooms.

The Detroit Club

The Detroit Club opened its newly redone wing of 10 boutique hotel suites to the general public last year. The club at 712 Cass was members-only for more than a century.

These are hotels in the planning stages:

West Elm Hotel

West Elm is a boutique hotel planned for Woodward and Eliot Street in Midtown. Plans call for constructing a new 12-story building next to Wayne State University's Bonstelle Theatre building, which could become part of the hotel project. No opening date has been announced.

The Mid

The Mid is the name of two future towers at 3750 Woodward in Midtown and feature a 228-room hotel in addition to 60 luxury condominiums and retail space. Plans call for a summer groundbreaking and a December 2020 opening.

Cambria Hotel

The Cambria would be an all-new 154-room hotel at 600 W. Lafayette at the edge of downtown. The groundbreaking has yet to happen. The hotel would be aimed at business travelers.

Temple Detroit

The Temple Detroit will open at 640 Temple in a redeveloped former office building next to the Masonic Temple. It will have 100 hotel rooms as well as 70 for-rent apartments, and feature a restaurant, small music venue and a cocktail lounge inside a giant basement safe. The project's interior design will be done by a New York-based firm, Kravitz Design, which was founded by Grammy Award-winning musician Lenny Kravitz.

In the map below, purple denotes hotels that are open in Detroit while orange signifies hotels still in the planning stages.

More projects to come

There are four announced projects for new downtown-area Detroit hotels. They range from 100 rooms to 228 rooms and are generally aimed at well-monied guests, rather than discount-seeking travelers.

“The fact that a lot of these are 100, 120 rooms — they are not 400 or 500 room hotels — makes (the influx) a bit more palatable," said Christos Moisides, an owner and development partner for the planned 100-room Temple Detroit boutique hotel.

Dan Gilbert's real estate company Bedrock is considering adding hotels to three downtown redevelopments — the Book Tower, the Hudson's site the old 1300 Beaubien police headquarters and — but hasn't announced any final decisions.

There are no longer any active plans to construct big downtown hotels.

Last year, the owner of the Crowne Plaza Hotel near Cobo Center sought to build a second tower with 500 additional hotel rooms, but Detroit City Council rejected the $164-million proposal, citing room conditions in the existing hotel tower and the lack of a pro-labor working environment, according to the Detroit News.

There were once tentative plans to put a 300-plus room hotel on the riverfront site of the now-empty Joe Louis Arena, once the arena gets torn down. However, the New York firm that owns future rights to that property has sought flexibility to possibly build something else there.

And the Ilitch organization says it still plans to build a hotel at Woodward and Henry Street, near the new Little Caesars Arena. A representative for Olympia Development on Thursday could not provide details or an anticipated timeline for the project.

ContactJC Reindl at313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jcreindl. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.