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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I've said this before but I think DC should also invest in making downtown more of a tourist destination. There are hotels downtown, but they are targeted much more at business/political travelers and not at tourists in town for pleasure. Many tourists who spend their days visiting the monuments and museums wind up staying in Rosslyn or Pentagon/Crystal city and coming in on buses.

DC should create an initiative to attract hotel developers to downtown, with incentives for anyone willing to re-develop existing office space. They should study what it would take to get tourists to stay downtown (I guarantee one need would be greater crime enforcement, but there are probably other things too -- I think some kind of shuttle that ran between downtown hotels and the mall would be a big selling point for families). More tourists will also make it possible to fill in more of the street-level retail, since tourists have to eat and drink and are more inclined to shop than the average office dweller anyway.

There should be federal money for this as well -- it's about bringing tourists into the nation's capitol. Including foreign tourists, there are diplomatic incentives![/quote]

By virtue of location, the suburban hotels are cheaper. [/quote]

If you built micro rooms and other more efficient uses of space downtown, you could compete on cost. Especially if you could offer convenient and inexpensive transportation to DC tourist sites -- tourists could avoid renting cars or paying for transportation into the city.

It would be especially appealing to international visitors who are used to this kind of arrangement in other foreign cities. Midwesterners might sill prefer to stay in Northern Virginia, but that has to do with preferring to be somewhere with parking and that looks more familiar to them, not cost.

If you target younger travelers and foreign travelers, there are big incentives to offering a downtown core with hotels, restaurants, and easy transportation to museums and other points of interest.[/quote]

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