The overflow of oil cleanup workers in Grand Isle has spilled over to St. Charles, with a couple of hotels running near maximum capacity with cleanup crews.
Judy Courville, the manager of Best Western in Luling, said that the hotel is pretty much booked to capacity with cleanup crews. Currently, 21 of the hotel’s rooms are filled with workers and it has been like that for the past month, she said.
The Comfort Inn in Luling has also seen an influx of cleanup workers.
“We do have a lot of cleanup workers staying here,” Cassandra Coleman, of Comfort Inn, said. “We have been running a full house since they’ve been here for the last month.”
The increase in hotel occupancy is the silver lining to the oil disaster, Corey Faucheux, the economic development director for St. Charles Parish, said.
“There is a positive impact when those workers stay in the parish because they are more prone to eat close to their hotel and they will perform limited shopping in the area as well,” he said. “Hotel occupancy has risen in all of the south Louisiana coastal parishes and that will lead to an increase in sales tax from those hotels inside those areas.”
Faucheux said that lodging is one of the business sectors that has additional opportunities to capture extra revenue during a disaster such as the BP oil leak.
“I’ve been attending a lot of regional conferences on the oil spill and there are a lot of business sectors that have increased their business, including hotels,” he said. “I’ve also heard that caterers are doing well in areas near the spill as are equipment rental firms and those selling products like cleaning supplies and gear, port-o-lets and things of that nature.”
However, none of those gains are enough to overcome the negative impact that the moratorium on deep water drilling is having on the region.
“There is no way that the increase in business in those sectors will offset the loss of jobs created by the moratorium,” Faucheux said.
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