Downtown Raleigh is going through a hotel renaissance.
An analysis by WRAL found that in 50 years - between 1969 and 2019 - downtown Raleigh had six hotels. Since then, five more have popped up in downtown, nearly doubling the number of hotels in just six years.
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Two more hotels, the Omni Hotel, at 10 W. South St., and Element by Westin, at 415 S. Blount St., are in development and expected to be built in the next couple of years.
While most hotel developments come from private-sector funding, taxpayers are paying $75 million for the 600-room Omni, which will be built across the street from the Raleigh Convention Center to support the center’s $400 million expansion.
“It’s going to give us the capacity to do even larger events at the convention center, you know, host events that we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” said Raleigh Mayor Janet Cowell.
It’s all part of the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau’s 10-year strategic plan.
In the current hotel landscape, the Downtown Raleigh Alliance says hotel room occupancy in 2025 was about 68 percent – outperforming comparable cities and the national average. According to commercial real estate information company CoStar, the national occupancy rate in 2025 was 65 percent.
The Downtown Raleigh Alliance's 2025 State of Downtown Raleigh report shows that downtown's average daily room rate in 2025 was $207.
Tourism is big business for Wake County.
Each hotel booking charges a 6 percent room occupancy tax. This also applies to motels, inns and bookings through apps like Airbnb and VRBO.
In addition, there’s a 1 percent tax on the sale price of prepared food and beverages purchased at restaurants and bars -- a tax paid by residents and visitors alike.
In 2025, Wake County received $90.4 million from these taxes.
“Those funds go into expanding convention centers, enhancing an arena, adding new sports fields to towns, adding maybe a cultural arts component to one of the towns,” said Loren Gold, executive vice president of Visit Raleigh.
The hospitality taxes will help fund the Red Hat Amphitheater’s relocation and renovations to Lenovo Center. Past projects that the tax funded include the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and WakeMed Soccer Park.