NYC Hotels: When Will the Grayson Hotel Ever Open?

photo: Hyatt.com

Good things come to those who wait is an appropriate saying when it comes to hotel construction. It is typical for a new hotel to experience completion delays. Add all of the issues that the pandemic has brought, and those hotel development and construction delays can mushroom by months and years.

I remember a few years ago watching the extreme slow progress, or should I say catapulting delays, with respect to the completion of the Grand Hyatt Baha Mar in the Bahamas – – including the bankruptcy of the resort’s developer and the acquisition of the project by a Chinese entity. The delayed openings of the Park Hyatt Auckland and the Park Hyatt St. Kitts are other examples.

photo: Hyatt.com

We can officially add the Grayson Hotel, an Unbound Collection Hotel by Hyatt, in New York City to the list of hotels suffering insurmountable completion delays. Since I live in NYC, I’ve taken an interest in this hotel since at least early this summer. I like the Bryant Park area of Midtown Manhattan and it has the potential of being a really nice hotel. I’m sure that, through no fault of the hotel itself, each month, the opening is delayed yet another month, and so on and so on. Finally, after pushing off the opening date countless times, Ms. Lizzie Fernandez-Fruto, the Director of Revenue Management confidently stated that the hotel was definitely slated to open on November 8th.

On Sunday, I was in the neighborhood and decided to see with my own eyes what the area looked like. This was the view of the hotel from across the street.

Not terrible, right? I then went across the street, closer to the front of the hotel, and took a few more photos.

Obviously, the site is still a construction zone of sorts, but overall, it looks really nice! However, from the little I could see, I could not tell whether it is just a matter of adding the finishing touches or whether an opening date sometime in 2023 is more realistic.

What do you think?

In the meantime, I just noticed that, although the hotel website says [n]ow accepting reservations for stays from November 8, 2022 and beyond, the system is actually not permitting any reservations before December 1st.

And so it goes.