Roanoke Valley confronts hotel room shortage

As a trio of hotels shuttered in the city over the past several years, the number of rooms available in Roanoke to travelers has shrunk.

Two hotels — the Blue Ridge Hotel & Conference Center, which closed in late 2019, and a Days Inn that shuttered in 2022 — were replaced by multifamily developments. And the city purchased and demolished a Ramada Inn in 2022 that was located in a floodplain.

“Our room supply is at a 10.3% deficit compared to 2019, meaning we have 615 fewer hotel rooms available every night in the market,” says Kathryn Lucas, a spokesperson for Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge, the region’s destination marketing organization. “This loss of inventory prevents us from booking larger conferences or sporting events.”

In particular, the Blue Ridge Hotel’s closure left the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center as the valley’s only option for large conferences, Lucas adds.

In response to the hotel room shortage, Roanoke City Council adopted a tax abatement program for hotel developers and renovators this summer. While there’d been no takers as of late 2025, the city had two meetings scheduled with possible developers in January, according to Marc Nelson, Roanoke’s director of economic development.

“The biggest bang for the buck is in larger projects that tend to be in the $30 [million] to $40 million range,” says Nelson.

Other localities are also working to grow the region’s supply of hotels.

A decade after a hotel feasibility study was conducted in Vinton, a $13 million, four-story, 94-room hotel is under construction. The Extended Stay America Premier Suites will tentatively open in September, according to Vinton Town Manager Pete Peters.

Peters said the town invested $543,000 to acquire land downtown, which it sold to Colonial Heights-based KARA Hospitality for $10. Incentives from Vinton and Roanoke County for the hotel project totaled about $1.5 million, according to Peters.

Salem City Council budgeted $50,000 this fiscal year for a hotel feasibility study; however, no time frame had been set to start the study as of early January, according to city spokesperson Mike Stevens.

Meanwhile, a four-story, 79-room Hampton Inn by Hilton opened in Daleville in June 2025. Botetourt County spokesperson Brent Watts said no tax incentives were provided for the hotel. “The real incentive is the wonderful Botetourt market,” he stated in an email.