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Rosen Hotels' Harris Rosen

'We're not going to see any stabilization in terms of occupancy, even if we don't add any rooms, until the economy rebounds.'

By Carl Cronan | Updated on October 06, 2009

Harris Rosen had a vision of what Orlando’s hotel market could become shortly after Walt Disney World opened the gates to the Magic Kingdom. Over the past 35 years, he has acquired and developed seven hotels within the city’s theme park and convention areas, and is investing substantial dollars in refurbishing those properties over the next several years. Having started in the hospitality industry as a sales rep at New York City’s Waldorf Astoria, the president of Rosen Hotels & Resorts is considered an industry legend and the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management is named in his honor. Rosen recently spoke with GlobeSt.com about the state of Orlando’s 112,000-room hotel base.

GlobeSt.com: Is the Orlando hotel sector in any danger of being overbuilt?

Rosen: Occupancies in this market have been on the decline the past several years, ever since Sept. 11, 2001. To be quite candid, our inventory has been pretty flat since then. We recently added a fairly large property to International Drive and the Peabody has also added rooms near the Orange County Convention Center. The addition of those roughly 2,500 rooms will not be a negative. It will help us from a marketing perspective to have more rooms contiguous to our convention center.

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