12:28 PM CDT on Monday, October 3, 2005

By Mike Zientek / 11 News

The Astros won a spot in the playoffs Sunday night, but a serious question lingers amid the revelry: Will there be room for all of the out-of-town visitors who bring in much-needed tourist dollars?

Houston hotel rooms are already at capacity with hurricane evacuees, and city leaders are in a mad scramble for space.

Kids always want to make a splash, especially when the temperature hits 90 degrees in October.

KHOU-TV

Officials say Houston's hotel capacity is at 95 percent.

Chad Whitman and his children took a dip at the La Quinta pool, but they’re not here on vacation.

They came from the southeast Texas town of groves, where there’s no power thanks to Hurricane Rita.

“They’ve been great here,” Chad Whitman said. “Really -- they brought us in, they said come on in, gave us a suite upstairs -- everything’s good.”

And many others have similar stories.

Officials with the hotel industry said about 55,000 hurricane evacuees are staying in area hotel rooms, shooting the occupancy rate to around 95 percent.

With the Astros’ games right around they corner, a question of where they will stay is in the air.

The head of Houston’s hotel association said evacuees are leaving slowly, and the trick is to snap up those empty rooms righ taway.

The hotel association is trying to do that for tourists, with the help of the Red Cross’ booking agency.

“They have an idea of where availability is by city and hotel in reference for taking long term stays for evacuees,” Joan Johnson of the Greater Houston Hotel Association said. “So we call them and say, ‘Where are the rooms?’”

The head of the convention and visitors bureau is also concerned.

“We’ve not seen occupancy like this in the history of Houston,” Jordy Tollett said.

The George R. Brown is no longer a shelter and is open for business. Officials believe they can find enough room for visitors this month.

“If they don’t get the power on in Beaumont and Port Arthur and those areas, and they for some reason can’t continue reopening part of Louisiana, we could have a problem,” Tollett said.

Several rental car businesses said their market is tight as well.

As far as the hotel space situation, city leaders said they haven’t seen anything like this since the Super Bowl in 2004, but that was just for four days.