New Luxury Hotels Projected to Boost Economy $5 Billion

Several new resort hotels planned for the coast could bring an extra $5 billion or so to the county’s economy.

Accountant Kenneth Leventhal & Co. said 4,700 new resort hotel rooms are on the drawing boards in the county, a number that he said is likely to double by the end of the decade. There are 1,700 rooms in local resort hotels now.

All those new rooms should boost the number of tourists who visit the county, said Gary Wescombe, one of the accounting firm’s partners. In 1988--the latest figures available--nearly 35 million tourists visited the county, and another million came on business or for conventions.

Those people spent $6.5 billion, tourism officials estimate, nearly a third of which was spent on lodging.

The hotels already planned include three in Huntington Beach. (Another just recently opened.) They have a total of 1,450 rooms. Then there are three hotels--2,150 rooms among them--planned for the coastal hills between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach.

And two hotels were planned in Dana Point with a total of about 1,100 rooms, but their future has been uncertain, because their Australian developer went into receivership last year.