Photo courtesy of Don Riddle Images
Boston’s Ritz-Carlton hotel reopens on Thursday with new promotional packages designed to capture the all-important leisure travel market.
The 193-room property has been shut down since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. As it welcomes its first guests in nearly 15 months, the hotel is offering a “family fun” package for two-room reservations at $595 per room, with a 50 percent discount on an adjacent second room.
Changes are in store for operations as well, with the hotel announcing new policies designed to address travelers’ COVID concerns. Face coverings will be required indoors, and hotel staff will use hospital-grade disinfectants in guest rooms and public areas, and electrostatic sprayers to clean surfaces.
Boston hotels are relying heavily on leisure travel to prop up occupancy rates for the remainder of 2020, amid a slow bounceback for business and convention bookings. Leisure travelers are expected to comprise 55 percent of demand for Boston-Cambridge properties in 2021, according to hospitality consultants Pinnacle Advisory Group. Prior to the pandemic, urban hotels received two-thirds of their business from the business and group travel markets.
Another new Ritz-Carlton promotion, the “bed and breakfast” package, includes breakfast for two in the hotel’s Artisan Bistro and access to the neighboring Equinox Sports Club Boston. Hotel staff will offer tea to the public brewed from the original 1927 recipe at noon Thursday to mark the reopening.
