Make room for Dennis

04:14 PM CDT on Saturday, July 9, 2005

By Doug Miller / 11 News

Click to watch video

Hurricane Dennis may not come anywhere near Houston, but the city's already feeling some effects from the storm.

Some hotels are already reporting a spike in reservations from hurricane evacuees fleeing the storm.

Houston's biggest hotel is hearing from some unexpected guests.

Friday the front desk welcomed its first evacuees from Hurricane Dennis.

"We've definitely been getting a lot of calls from the areas of Florida, Louisiana and even as far as Georgia," says Anna Drake, Hilton Americas Hotel spokeswoman.

Other Houston hotels see the same phenomenon.

KHOU-TV

The first evacuees from Hurricane Dennis started showing up at Houston hotels on Friday.

"We got a phone call from a company in New Orleans who needed a hundred rooms for this weekend to house the people from the storm and flooding," says Debbie Henderson from the Sheraton Houston Brookhollow Hotel.

When Hurricane Ivan struck last year, thousands of evacuees headed for Houston. But many of them had trouble finding hotel rooms here.

"One of the things that happened is people made reservations and they assumed that if they made reservations for tonight it was for tomorrow night and the next night also," says Joan Johnson, president of the Hotel Motel Association of Greater Houston. "And in the hotel business that's not the way it works."

Interestingly enough, all of this is hitting close to home for some people in the hotel industry. A number of them have said they're getting phone calls from their friends in the industry who live in low-lying areas in Louisiana and Florida.

Those people are getting their families out now, making reservations in the Houston area before the hotels here have a chance to fill up.

Now, at Houston hotels, it could become a long weekend.